Global Climate Change - Hitting the poorest hardest by Anuradha Vittachi, Director, OneWorld UK 12:42pm 2nd Jan, 2006   02.01.2006    Till 2005, the vast majority of the general public, and even most global justice activists, saw climate change as ‘an environmental issue’ of secondary importance to ‘people-issues’. But OneWorld lists just a few of the multiple connections beginning to emerge between climate change, poverty and social justice. We are grateful to OneWorld’s network of partners, and especially to IIED, as expert sources for the information below.    1. When Hurricane Katrina struck the United States, it did more than expose the uncontrollable violence of climate change. It exposed a new brand of social injustice - climate injustice – since the vast majority of those who suffered or died needlessly came from New Orleans’ impoverished communities.    2. Climate injustice is even more pronounced between rich and poor countries, as the Asia tsunami revealed. Hundreds of thousands of people died who could have been saved had there been an early warning system protecting the global south, like the systems in place to protect citizens in the north. The tsunami may have been a ‘natural disaster’ – but it was the combination of natural forces and unequal human protection that turned it into a tragedy.    3. Poorer people suffer greater consequences not only because they have less money but because they have less political clout. Until people living in marginalised communities are empowered through participatory media supporting participatory politics, their human right to a climate-friendly future will be at risk.    4. That marginalisation is suffered also by southern governments. Mozambique’s government understood the systemic, spiralling character of poverty creation and eradication. Six months before the floods hit, it appealed for just $2.7 million for disaster preparedness - but received less than half this meagre amount. After the floods, Mozambique received $100 million in emergency assistance and a further $450 million was pledged for rehabilitation. But a stitch in time could have save nine.    5. Most climate change disasters are not sudden and spectacular, like a tsunami, but silent, stealthy and with spiralling effects. Critically, for example, climate change destabilises rainfall patterns so that they become erratic and extreme – leading to droughts and floods. These in turn create major obstacles for the smallholders who are the main food producers in the global south. Even where their valiant struggles to adapt to changing weather patterns succeed, their crops may now yield less per hectare than they used to. This reduces national food supplies and increases hunger - among people who have no margin left for reducing their nutritional intake.    6. No or low yields also erode the farmers’ sustainability. Where rainfall goes on being erratic, farmers with no financial margins find their livelihoods quickly sliding out of their hands. And that affects a great many people. In the south farmers do not make up the small proportion of the population that they do in the north. In Africa, 70% of working people are small-scale farmers: so hundreds of millions of people are affected by climate change in terms of reduced livelihoods on top of the hundreds of millions suffering from the reduced food supply.    7. The poverty spiral doesn’t stop there. Poor people with less food have lowered immunity to illness. And those with lowered immunity are not only more likely to catch diseases but to suffer severer impacts when they do. It should come as no surprise – although it should stay shocking – that 90% of the millions who die of malaria in Africa are children under five years old.    8. Sickness in an already-poor family makes the family spiral quickly down into still greater poverty. Malaria alone is estimated already to have slowed economic growth in Africa by up to 1.3% each year.    9. Scientists are also pointing out that climate change has the power to change disease patterns (e.g. it can introduce malaria to areas previously free of it). And malaria is just one example from a vast range of health stressers – from air pollution to heat stress - caused by climate change. WHO estimates a loss of 5.5 million ‘disability-adjusted life years’ directly caused by climate change in the year 2002.    10. As climate-related droughts bite harder, water wars will vie with oil wars to bring about the most violent way to die. The UN’s environment agency (UNEP) warned back in 1999 that 14 African countries were already subject to water stress or water scarcity and a further 11 countries would join them in the next 25 years. Migrants will move across borders in search of water, rather than public health services. And though the world will have to find ways to do without oil, we can’t do without water: December’s bangs at Buncefield [the burning oil depot] will be nowhere near as nightmarish as the whimpers of thirst to come.    11. In all these ways – and others that I have no room here to list - people living in poverty are hit not just a little bit harder by climate change than their richer counterparts but spectacularly harder.    12. Although the poorest people are left to suffer most of the consequences of climate change, they are also the people who least responsible for causing it. And the rich are not just a little more culpable than the poor in creating climate change, but spectacularly more culpable.    13. So are the rich world’s policy-makers racing to mend their ways, now that the climate cat is out of the bag? The feeble responses at the G8 Summit in July (which purported to care both about global warming and about poverty), and again during the Millennium Summit in September (which avoided climate change commitments like the plague), and even during the December conference in Montreal, all proved how little political stamina there really is to right this hideous wrong.    14. The problem isn’t a shortage of money. (Where did those hundreds of billions of dollars materialise from, for bombing Iraq?) It’s a question of priorities. In 2003, the World Bank spent 86% of its energy budget on fossil fuel projects - and only 14% on funding renewables.    15. People – especially politicians – talk about climate change as if it will begin to affect us seriously in 50 or even 100 years’ time. But there are scientists who say that solar dimming may have been responsible for the millions of ruined lives, for example, causing the epic Sahelian droughts of the mid-1980s. If they are right, it is a huge irony that LiveAid should have arisen in 1985 as a response to a climate-induced tragedy – and yet Live8 and MPH twenty years later should have focused on the traditional themes of aid, debt and trade, to the determined exclusion of climate change.    16. It is not just human life that is under threat: 20% of all known species in the world live in the increasingly fragile ecosystems of Africa. Who can assess the spiralling, long-term consequences of such lost biodiversity?    17. So what is at the root of all this inertia? Just selfishness and myopic denial? A fear among those in power that it is actually us citizens, their voters, who are too selfish and myopic to stand for the kinds of serious changes that are needed? It apparently shows ‘leadership’ to drop bombs from a safe height on families thousands of miles away - but to risk unpopularity at home by banning gas-guzzling cars or curbing air-travel is too scary for these heroes. We citizens will need to lead the way for governments lacking the courage of their convictions.    18. There is no time left to waste. We hear about climate change beginning to be a serious problem in 2050 or even in 100 years’ time. That’s nonsense. Climate injustice, as we have seen above, is steadily eroding and destroying the lives of hundreds millions of the world’s people right now. We just don’t label the cause correctly. Millions of children under-fives died of malaria in 2005 – and that’s not ‘just a health problem’, or ‘just a poverty problem’, it’s a climate change problem too.    19. Even those of us who live in the north, deaf and blind to the misery of our brothers and sisters in the south, have very little time left. The people living in the south are merely our vanguard. It’s not a problem that will strike the planet and its people when we are safely dead. Within our lifetimes, and those of our children, we will have released the sleeping giants of undersea methane, new epidemics, water wars, melted glaciers, economic chaos and famine - if we go on as we are. Irreversibility Day is set for 2030 – unless we each commit to taking serious personal action now.    20. Nothing less will do.    Click on the link below to read reviews by OneWorld editors of the people who made a difference in our world in 2005.    Powerful women crashed the all-boys clubs in Latin America and Africa... some corporations and local governments took the lead in promoting environmental stewardship... Colombians "opted out" of war; Hiroshima survivors, American youths, and weapons experts demanded a nuclear-free world.. indigenous movements prove there is another way.    2005 has been called "the year of disasters." It was also the year that individuals, organizations, corporations, and governments gave their time, talents, and money to help those whose lives were turned upside-down... Ordinary people are making change happen everyday in their communities and around the globe... Consumers are brandishing their power over multinational corporations, students are standing up to university officials, and the world''s superpower seemingly heard it from everybody in 2005... Visit the related web page
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