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Climate Change And Wealth Show A Relationship, Study

By R. Siva Kumar | Update Date: Mar 01, 2016 02:07 PM EST

As climate change continues to warm the Earth and fish and other important resources move toward the Earth's poles, the world's wealthiest people too are also getting less affected than the most deprived, according to a new study from Rutgers University.

A shift in the behavior of migrating fish is an important issue, impacting those who are dependent on them.

"What we find is that natural resources like fish are being pushed around by climate change and that changes who gets access to them," Malin Pinsky, who participated in the research, said in a press release.

The study was published in the Feb.24, 2016 issue of Nature Climate Change.

Pinsky said that if natural resource management is strong and well conducted in a community, there would be greater value for its natural resources, even if they show an increase. Communities and nations with better resource management would benefit, but the situation would be mired in inequality.

Worryingly, the world's "Inclusive wealth," which includes fish, plants and trees as well as human health and education, is showing a shift from temperate zones and into the polar regions, with an increase in the temperatures. His paper, in which Pinsky documented information gathered during his studies on fish migration, along with a mathematical formula built up by economist Eli Fenichel, shows that natural resource movement and wealth enjoy a unique link.

"We tend to think of climate change as just a problem of physics and biology," Pinsky said. "But people react to climate change as well, and at the moment, we don't have a good understanding of the impacts of human behavior on natural resources affected by climate change."

The team aims to study the human side of the equation, in order to get an insight into the links between wealth and climate.

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