Global warming imposes a lot of negative effects not only to our welfare and environment but also to our economy. Agricultural sector of the global community starts to experience significant drop on productivity due to the sudden change of climate that negatively affects the survival of various crops in the field. GDP of those agricultural based countries like Philippines and other Asian countries, as changes in the climate becomes more evident into their country.
As a result, economic growth of these developing countries depreciates as people who depend much their source of living to agriculture receives less income. Industries the uses agricultural products as one of their factors of production are also being affected by global warming as shortage of agricultural products occurs in the economy. On the other hand, as for the case of the United States, the federal government has to spend at least one percent of their annual GDP in order to prevent the entire economy to reach the recession stage.
In Iceland, the sudden increase of temperature due to global warming caused a widespread sowing of barley, one of the main products of the said country. Furthermore, the insurance industry already approaches instability due to the large number of disaster triggered by the change in climate fir the past decades which significantly cut the profitability of the said industry. Like for instance, the risk of households and property in U.
K. increased by 2 to 4 percent annually due to the fast changing weather conditions, as well as the doubling of cost of damages of natural calamities to over ? 6 billion from 1998 to 2003. But despite of all the negative impacts of global warming to the above mention industries and economic sectors, the said natural phenomenon still provides benefits to the economic world specifically to the industry of commercial shipping lines.
With the increase of temperature around the globe, sea-ice in the arctic region started to melt providing a new navigational route for commercial shipping lines. Navigating through the Northwest Passage would provide tremendous cut in the cost of navigating between Asia and Europe as well as U. S. It was found out that the travel route from Southeast Asia going to Western Europe using the Northern Passage of the Canadian arctic takes only 7,900 nautical miles as compared to the 12,600 nautical miles of travel using the Panama Canal.
Another advantage of using the Northern Passage aside from it offers short distance of travelling, would be the fact that the Northern Passage is much wider that the Panama Canal, therefore, commercial shipping lines would no longer have to wait for their turns in passing the said channel as compared to Panama Canal wherein commercial shipping lines has to wait for their turn first before they could pass the said channel due to its limited space.
There is also a speed limit in Panama Canal which cost the commercial shipping lines with more fuel and time due to the large number of shipping lines crowding to one another in using the limited space of the Panama Canal as compared to Northern Passage wherein every commercial shipping lines enjoys optimal speed and large space to navigate with and this is all thanks to the fast melting of sea-ice in the Canadian Arctic caused by global warming.
In other words, traveling using the Northern Passage can save a lot of fuel and can provide faster delivery of cargos of commercial shipping lines which at the end of the day provide an avenue towards the attainment of higher profitability in the said industry (Paster 1). Moreover, commercial shipping lines can now use much larger vessels to transport cargos on one trip as compared to smaller vessels which takes around two trips before being able to transfer same amount of cargo.
Due to this, the industry of commercial shipping lines can now experience impressive growth through the aid of the Northern Passage of the Canadian Arctic.
Works cited
Paster, Pablo “The Northwest Passage. ” 24 September 2007. AskPablo. org. 23 March 2008 <http://www. triplepundit. com/pages/askpablo-the-northwest-passage-002603. php>.