It feels like everybody these days is talking about the link between global warming and humanitarian emergencies. What was once a rather esoteric aside to climate change chatter is now the stuff of conferences, appeals and tabloid op-eds.

A leaked draft of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests what's at stake: food shortages for an additional 200 million to 600 million people by 2080; water scarcity for up to 3.2 billion people by the century's end; 7 million homes hit by coastal flooding...

No wonder the U.N. environment agency is pressuring Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to call an emergency climate summit. The powwow, pencilled in for September, would grope its way towards a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on cutting greenhouse gases widely blamed for forecasts of heat waves, droughts, rising sea levels and ever more severe hurricanes.

At a summit in Ethiopia today, experts said Africa must prepare itself for more droughts, floods and cyclones because of climate change caused by industrial pollution, which has already damaged rural economies on the continent.

In the meantime, the world's biggest volunteers' association is putting climate change at the top of its humanitarian agenda for 2007.

In its annual appeal, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) is asking for $285 million for its activities this year. A big chunk of that cash will be spent on disaster preparedness and risk reduction in response to a rising number of natural disasters linked to climate change such as floods as storms. (For the latest statistics on global disasters, see Disasters and climate change - do the math.)

The IFRC responded to 137 floods around the world in 2006. Two years earlier, they responded to just 63. Africa bore the brunt of this increase in floods, with the number shooting up to 32 last year from just 5 in 2004.

"The people most affected by climate change will be the world's most vulnerable… the elderly, the disabled and the poorest of the poor," said IFRC Secretary-General Markku Niskala.

"If this pattern continues, the international community will run out of financial and human resources to adequately respond to the world's disasters so it's crucial that we invest heavily in making communities stronger and more resilient in the first place."

In the 1960s, groundbreaking books such as Rachael Carson's Silent Spring helped launch the environmental movement. These days, the likes of the Stern Report and Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth are giving global consciousness a similar shove.

For policymakers, aid agencies and journalists alike, it's getting harder to ignore the humanitarian impact of a hotter planet. At AlertNet, it wasn't long ago that we used to debate whether stories about climate change had a place on the site at all, nestled in among the wars, earthquakes and health crises. Now we can hardly keep them off the front page.