WORLD LEADERS must act decisively to address “the greatest peril to humanity this century”, according to a new report by Oxfam International.
The climate change report states that 26 million people have already been displaced by the impact of global warming.
Suffering the Science: Climate Change, People and Poverty, released today, draws on the experience of people in developing countries who have been hard-hit by storms, flooding or drought, often losing their homes.
“We went to sleep the night before, and woke up in the morning with water everywhere. The only thing we were able to save was the roof of the house,” says Magdalena Mansilla, a 51-year-old farmer in Lambayong in the southern Philippines.
Gary Novamn, a small farmer in Haiti, says: “We used to get three good rains. Now we don’t even get two. There’s no more rainy season, just the hurricane season. As soon as people see clouds forming, they put together their stuff and head for the hills.”
Mukelabai Liywalii, whose family was driven out of their home by April floods in Zambia, is still stunned by what happened: “We put all our children in the canoe and paddled about 25km . We could not save our crops, so we have no food. We are eating nothing.”
As the Oxfam report was being prepared in May, Cyclone Aila hit Bangladesh and eastern India, killing more than 200, including many children, leaving 750,000 homeless and affecting 3.6 million through water contamination and the devastation of food crops.
“Climate change is damaging people’s lives today,” the report notes. “Even if world leaders agree the strictest possible curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, the prospects are very bleak for hundreds of millions . . . most of them among the world’s poorest.”
It describes Oxfam’s experience in nearly 100 countries as definitive proof that “hundreds of millions of people are already suffering . . . frustrating their efforts to escape poverty”, and calls for immediate action.
Otherwise, the report warns, 375 million people may be affected by climate-related disasters by 2015 and up to 200 million “may be on the move each year by 2050 because of hunger, environmental degradation and loss of land” as a result of drought or flooding.
Without action, according to the Oxfam report, “most of the gains that the world’s poorest countries have made in development and ameliorating the harmful affects of poverty in the past 50 years will be lost, irrecoverable in the foreseeable future”.
It quotes Graciela Martinez, a mother of eight in Mexico: “The rich are still swimming in their pools while we are dying of thirst . . . We have got no toilets. I can’t wash my children. I can’t cook . . . And the worst thing is we have got almost nothing to drink.”
The report describes the effect of global warming on poor people in developing countries as “one of the most bitter ironies of our times. The nations that made themselves wealthy by burning fossil fuels are largely those that will, initially, suffer least from the effects of climate shift”.
At the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen next December, it argues 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 . . . by 2050”.
Rich countries must also provide at least $150 billion (€107 billion) a year to help developing states to cope with climate change. As Oxfam notes, this equates to the cost of bailing out US insurance giant AIG last autumn.
