Climate Change: The threat to the developing world

Despite the horrendous noise in GH7, the speakers boldly shouted above the fracas to get their points across. And important points they were. Global warming is already a reality, it is not some far off future event, but its effects will only get more severe in the future. Unsurprisingly, it is the poor who are the worst affected and who have the least resources to cope.

Journalist Mark Lynas showed pictures highlighting some of the effects of climate change we are seeing today. Floods in England, environmental refugees in Mongolia. These are people who are forced to leave their livelihoods and land as a result of severe weather conditions, in this case dust storms have forced whole villages to be abandoned. These are not people we hear about in the media yet. These are people left bereft by aggressive abuse of the climate by the West.

In Peru, what used to be great glaciers have retreated by up to a kilometre. In the decades ahead there will be nothing left. This is not just about the loss of beautiful scenery but also the loss of a crucial water supply to some of the world’s poorest people. Low level countries like Tivalu are literally sinking. This is not confined to developing countries. Miami and Florida Keys will also sink as “no part of the world that can escape the effects of global warming.” Is this what it will take for America to ratify Kyoto?

The doom and gloom continues. By 2050 there will possibly be no sea ice, the Amazon will fall prey to desertification. UK concerns and understanding about the environment remain worryingly low. Despite David King, the Government's chief scientist who recently spoke at a Greenpeace business lecture, warning that 'climate change presents a greater threat than global terrorism', 50 per cent of the UK population have never heard of Kyoto.

Saleemul Huk from the International Institute for Environmental Development (IEED), is from Bangladesh. Bangladesh, one of the very poorest countries in the world, is one of the low-lying places which will be going under over the next 100 years. Severe weather extremes are happening closer and closer together. The pertinent questions remain: who is going to suffer? The poorest people, even in the Western world and vulnerable people living in vulnerable areas. Conditions are going to get worse. Developing countries are used to occasional severe weather impacts, but these are no longer as rare as they used to be.

In Rio in 1992 the UN Convention on Climate Change was signed and ratified by every country there, including the United States. It includes a stipulation that rich countries must help poor countries deal with climate change. Many of the poorest countries in the world, those where people eke out an existence on less than $1 a day, are geographically the most susceptible to climate change. A meagre $20 million has been given to combat this. We are of course, still waiting for the US contribution.

Carolyn Stephen is a professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and also works in Brazil. Governments, she says, are still asking for more evidence of climate change. Well, we have that evidence. Global temperatures are rising, often as a result of Western attempts to deal with the increasingly warmer weather, air conditioning being a prime example. As natural resources disappear the rate of death rises, food production and productivity depletes, health deteriorates and wars increase.

The final speaker Andrew Simms, the political director of the New Economic Foundation (NEF), argued forcefully that tackling global poverty and climate change are inseparable. The exploitation of natural resources is infinitely linked to the wealth of nations. We need to level the ecological debt playing field. The global north owes the global south an insurmountable amount. Everyone has an equal entitlement to the global atmosphere, we have been over-consuming for hundreds of years. We should pay for the extra that we use, and pay well.

Even the big-boys feel the effects of global warming, BP recently blamed, apparently without irony, the drop in its estimated profits on three massive extreme weather events affecting its rigs. Simms, finished with a quote from Dubya at a recent NASA conference “It is time for the human race to join the Solar System.” Well with his help, we appear to be half-way there.

There is no doubt that climate change exists and we all face an incredible threat. There is no time left to quibble its existence. It also remains unarguable that those nations bearing the biggest responsibility for it should be forced to stand up and take notice and begin to make some serious reparations if we are not going to leave half the world to sink.

By Jo Kuper