Christian Aid has produced an excellent and well-researched document called ‘Warning Signs: The Science and Impacts of Climate Change’. Included is a quote from a Christian Aid partner in Bangladesh, Nazmul Chowdhury: ‘Forget about making poverty history. Climate change will make poverty permanent.’
The report starts with Christian Aid’s Time for Climate Justice campaign calling for urgent action to tackle the climate crisis. The campaign is based on clear scientific information about climate change from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as the agency’s own work with poor people.
“It is the poorest people who are on the frontline of climate change: their livelihoods are often dependent on subsistence agriculture, while the places in which some of them live are vulnerable to drought, high winds or rising sea levels,” the report states. “A changing climate adds further risk and unpredictability to lives that are already lived on the edge.”
With the support of Christian Aid partner, Centre for Agricultural Development, Aldo and Hermogenia have learnt better farming and irrigation techniques, but life is still hard, according to the report. Harvests have decreased and water is an issue in ways it has never been before.
Christian Aid has encountered similar stories of a changing world in many places where it works. according to the report. In Kenya pastoralist communities are struggling with droughts that have increased in incidence four-fold over the past 25 years. Communities in Honduras face hurricanes that are significantly more frequent and severe than before, even allowing for natural variations. Farmers in Tajikstan have to cope with much hotter summers and changed patterns of rainfall ruining crops and undermining their livelihoods. And in Bangladesh sea-level rise means poor communities have to travel miles every day to collect water as their local well has been contaminated by salt-water.
Drought, sea-level rise, flooding and storms are all facts of life that poor people are well aware of. But from country to country poor communities tell a story of change – saying that the conditions in recent years are worse than they remember and that the weather is less predictable and more extreme than it used to be.
The report assesses the evidence, examines the causes and seeks to understand climate change as well as addressing common challenges to climate science. Questions like ‘Human activity is not a significant cause of global warming’, ‘The IPCC’s reports are riddled with errors’, ‘Sceptical voices are ignored and drowned out’ and ‘Climate change will be beneficial’.
The report refers to the UK Meteorological Office analysis of a four degree Celsius rise in temperature, which predicts:
Crop yields declining for all major cereal crops, causing a 10-20% increase in the numbers of people at risk of hunger
3 billion people exposed to water stress (limited access to fresh water)
sea-level rise of up to 80cm by 2100, affecting hundreds of millions of people, and much greater sea-level rise after that
significant increase in drought – one credible analysis suggests that half of all land surface could become subject to moderate drought conditions, and extreme drought might rise from affecting 1% of land surface to around 30%.
“These impacts will hit poor people first and worst. These people are the most susceptible to disease, the farmers with the least resources, the inhabitants of the most marginal land,” the report says. “Many of the places where they live will see temperature rises significantly higher than the global average – with 4 degrees of warming globally meaning 7 or 8 degrees for parts of Africa and Latin America, and 5 or 6 degrees in parts of Asia.”
The Christian Aid report concludes:
“The picture painted by climate science is not yet complete, but it is convincing and, in many ways, terrifying. Climate change hurts and kills poor people – and is threatening ever more damage in the future. There is a high risk that the world will do too little to tackle climate change and little risk that the world will do too much. Work by Lord Nicholas Stern and others also indicates that the cost of not acting to prevent climate change will be much greater than the cost of effectively tackling the problem.
“Christian Aid supports those who call for warming to be limited to less than 1.5 degrees or, if possible, lower.
“However, at the moment rich countries are not even taking the actions needed to meet a lower target of keeping warming below 2 degrees, even though they have pledged to do so on a number of occasions. If they allow global temperatures to rise over 1.5C, global leaders, especially in the rich world, must accept that they are allowing a huge human and ecological cost. Nazmul Chowdhury, a Chrstian Aid partner in Bangladesh, has said: ‘Forget about making poverty history. Climate change will make poverty permanent.’ Millions of lives will be lost, billions of people’s livelihoods threatened and the balance of nature disrupted beyond repair. The world would become a less safe and stable place.
“The focus must be on the urgent and effective action needed to cut emissions as quickly as possible to cope with the unavoidable impacts of climate change.
“Rich countries must take their responsibility seriously and lead the response now: at a minimum this means:
cutting their emissions by 40% b6 20220
providing new funds of well over €110bn a year to help developing countries adapt to climate impacts and develop cleanly”
To read the full report, go to http://www.christianaid.org.uk/images/time-for-climate-justiceJune2010.pdf.