PARIS: French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Friday told the world’s biggest carbon polluters that global warming was becoming a driver of hunger, unrest and conflict, with the war in Darfur a concrete example.

“Climate change is already having a considerable impact on security,” Sarkozy said in a speech to ministers from 16 economies that together account for 80 per cent of the planet’s greenhouse-gas emissions.

Water scarcity and rivalry for farmland and fishing resources were emerging as “major challenges”, especially in Africa, he said.

“In Darfur, we see this explosive mixture from the impact of climate change, which prompts emigration by increasingly impoverished people, which then has consequences in war,” said Sarkozy.

“If we keep going down this path, climate change will encourage the immigration of people with nothing towards areas where the population do have something, and the Darfur crisis will be only one crisis among dozens of others.” Nearly five years old, the war in southwestern Sudan has claimed more than 200,000 lives from fighting, famine and disease and 2.2 million others have been left homeless. The exodus has had a spillover effect on neighbouring countries.

The conflict began when ethnic minority rebels took up arms against the Arab-dominated regime and state-backed Arab militia, fighting for resources and power in one of the most remote and deprived places on earth.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon last June also suggested the Darfur conflict arose “at least in part” from climate change.

UN statistics showed rainfall declined some 40 percent over the past two decades as a rise in Indian Ocean temperatures disrupted monsoons, he said.

Sarkozy announced France would double its emergency food aid this year, spending $100 million.

Soaring prices for basic grains rice, wheat, soybean and corn have provoked protests and rioting in at least half a dozen developing countries in past months.

Experts say the food crisis has multiple causes.—AFP