The Poorest Will Suffer Most
Science is now as certain as it can be of harmful climate change. The only real uncertainty is about how much climate change and human suffering we are willing to allow and bear. According to todays report “Suffering the Science” by Oxfam, the latest science shows the impacts of climate change have a bearing on millions who live in the developing world.
The rise in global average temperatures is playing out differently over the poles, the tropics, the seas, and the big land masses.
Oxfam’s report says that it is a bitter irony that countries and economies located in temperate zones around the world will experience milder impacts from climate change – at least initially. However in the tropics, where the bulk of humanity lives, many of them in poverty, climate change is beginning already taking a terrifying toll on millions who live there.
A survey of top climate scientists, also published by Oxfam today, said poor people living in low-lying coastal areas, island atolls and mega deltas and farmers are most at risk from climate change because of flooding and prolonged drought. South Asia and Africa are climate change hotspots according to the scientists, all contributors to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Food Production is seriously threatened by Climate Change
South Asia (the world’s most populous region), Southern Africa, and the sub-Saharan region will see severe threats to food supply.
Rice plants react very quickly to temperature change: they show a 10 per cent drop in yield for every 1ºC rise in minimum temperature. Australia, a global leader in rice exports has seen a 90% drop in rice production in the areas most significantly impacted by current climate changes.
An Asian Development Bank report warns that rice production in the Philippines could drop by 50–70 per cent as early as 2020
A Stern Warning
Lord Stern, former chief economist to the World Bank, says there is ‘a big probability of a devastating outcome’ and that ‘the likelihood of global warming in the 21st century even beyond the threshold of a 2.4°C increase is dangerously high’. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, the advisor to the German chancellor on climate change, says that on the basis of the new evidence, he thinks anything up to 5°C of warming is ‘likely’ by 2100 under a ‘business as usual’ scenario. Under such a scenario, Schellnhuber expects the human population of the world to fall to just one billion.
How Much are you willing to pay for Insurance (if not climate change mitigation)
Climate-related disasters have been increasing in frequency at an extraordinary rate. Extend the line of the graph that charts such events between 1975 and 2008, and it says that in 2030 we will experience more than three times as many such disasters as today.
A record $165 billion was lost in the 2005 hurricane season alone and the insurance industry says that climate change will make the situation worse, particularly for poor people who have no access to insurance.
Recent report from the Insurance Companies clearly points to significantly higher insurance rates with up to 50% increase in costs due to climate change in the next ten years!
Will the Polluter Pays principle apply?
In Bolivia, residents of many communities depend on the Mururata glacier. It is where they get our water from for everything: cooking, washing, drinking, watering our gardens, feeding our animals. Without Mururata the nine communities that depend on it as a source of water won’t be able to survive here.
Since 1975 the glacier, which sits at 5,880 metres, has lost 22% of its surface and scientists estimate that in the next 40-50 years it will have disappeared forever.
Governments are concerned that climate change will spark increasing conflict between countries as scarcity of vital water supplies brings bitter disputes over their control. But developed nations should be concerned for another kind of dispute.
One community that depends on the Mururata glacier is not only mobilizing to take action by diversifying crops they plant to adapt to Climate Change, but also by taking eye-opening international action that should have the attention of all developed nations. With the assistance of the organisation Agua Sustentable (Sustainable Water) they are mounting a human rights case against the United States of America for the damages climate change has caused and will continue to cause to their community. They will be calling for the US to take urgent action to reduce their emissions as well as demanding financial compensation
A Target worth hitting
Rich countries must commit to reduce their own emissions by at least 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020 and all countries must act to reduce global emissions by at least 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.
Climate Breakdown
Experts in the science of climate change are calling on governments to accept and meet these climate mitigating targets so that global temperature increases are kept in the range of 2-2.5 degrees C for this century. The IPCC has said that ‘global mean temperature changes greater than 4ºC above 1990–2000 levels’ would ‘exceed … the adaptive capacity of many systems’. The Tyndall Centre’s more likely scenarios, based on current government strategies, point to 4–5ºC of warming this century. Therefore there is a genuine fear that the world may cross tipping points which make accelerated warming inevitable – such as the death of the rainforests and melting of the permafrost (both of which would then become sources of carbon emissions), the loss of almost all glaciers, and the melting of the polar ice caps.
Trees as Contributers to Climate Change?
If the earth heats up by more than 2.5ºC, recent research says that tropical forests may become a net source of carbon emissions as their vegetation starts to degrade. Forests currently absorb 25 per cent of the carbon produced every year.
Oxfams “Suffering the Science” report touches on other issues including disruptions to weather patterns and planting cycles, weather disasters, rising sea level, human health impacts of climate change and more.
The Bottom Line
We elect governments to act in our best interests. As with the economic crisis that galvanized the nations of the world to agree to significant changes to how we monitor banks, and set in place a global economic stimulus package it is time for world leaders to act in the best interests of not only those who elected them, but humanity as a whole. As the report concludes: “The true cost of climate change will not be measured in dollars, but in millions or billions of lives.”
{ 0 comments… add one now }