by Daniel Ooko

    NAIROBI, July 6 (Xinhua) -- Millions of people in East Africa face climate-related hunger as seasons shift and change, a new report published by aid agency Oxfam International said on Monday.

    The report said shifting seasons are destroying harvests and causing widespread hunger -- but this is just one of the multiple climate change impacts taking their toll on the world's poorest people, warning that multiple climate impacts could reverse 50 years of work to end poverty.

    The report, Suffering the Science -- Climate Change, People and Poverty, was published ahead of the G8 Summit in Italy, where climate change and food security are high on the agenda.

    It combines the latest scientific observations on climate change, and evidence from the communities Oxfam works with in almost 100 countries around the world, to reveal how the burden of climate change is already hitting poor people hard.

    "Climate change is the central poverty issue of our times. Climate change is happening today and the world's poorest people, who already face a daily struggle to survive, are being hit hardest," said Oxfam International Executive Director Jeremy Hobbs.

    "The evidence is right in front of our eyes. The human cost of climate change is as real as any redundancy or repossession notice."

    The report warns that without immediate action, 50 years of development gains in poor countries will be permanently lost. It says that climate-related hunger could be the defining human tragedy of this century.

    Suffering the Science outlines evidence of how climate change is affecting every issue linked to poverty and development today.

    According to Oxfam, new research based on interviews with farmers in 15 countries across the world reveals how once distinct seasons are shifting and rains are disappearing.

    "Farmers from Bangladesh to Uganda and Nicaragua, no longer able to rely on generations of farming experience, are facing failed harvest after failed harvest," it says.

    The report says rice and maize, two of the world's most important crops on which hundreds of millions depend, particularly in Asia, the Americas and Africa, face significant drops in yield seven under mild climate change scenarios.

    The report forecasts maize yields to drop by 15 percent or more by 2020 in much of sub-Saharan Africa and in most of India. One estimate puts the loss to Africa at 2 billion U.S. dollars a year.

    Oxfam's report says that it is a bitter irony that in temperate zones the impacts of climate change will be milder -- at least initially. However in the tropics, where the bulk of humanity lives, many of them in poverty, climate change is beginning to play out more erratically and harmfully.

    Oxfam is calling on G8 leaders to take personal responsibility for delivering a fair and adequate global deal to tackle climate change as only political commitment at the highest level can prevent a human catastrophe.

    Rich industrialized countries, which created the climate crisis and have the resources to tackle it, must cut their emissions by at least 40 percent from 1990 levels by 2020 and mobilize 150 billion dollars per year to fund emissions reduction and adaptation in the developing world.

    "It is scandalous that our leaders continue to resist doing what's needed, and within their power, to tackle the climate crisis," Hobbs said.

    "G8 leaders, who represent the world's richest polluting countries, must take personal responsibility for delivering a global climate deal which has the needs of the world's poorest people at the heart."

    A survey of top climate scientists, also published by Oxfam on Monday, said poor people living in low-lying coastal areas, island atolls and mega deltas and farmers are most at risk from climate change because of flooding and prolonged drought.

    The scientists, all contributors to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , named South Asia and Africa as climate change hotspots.

    Many scientists are now skeptical that the world can limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius because they do not believe that politicians are willing to agree to the necessary cuts in carbon emissions, the report says.

    The 2 degrees Celsius is considered to be "economically acceptable" to rich countries, but it would still mean a devastating future for 660 million people.

    The report says diseases such as malaria and dengue fever that were once geographically bound are creeping to new areas where populations lack immunity or the knowledge and healthcare infrastructure to cope with them.

    It is estimated that climate change has contributed to an average of 150,000 more deaths from disease per year since the 1970s, with over half of those happening in Asia.