Eradicating poverty impossible without tackling climate change, says report

Originally posted at tcktcktck.org

Overcoming poverty will be impossible if governments fail to tackle climate change, according to a new report from leading environment and development charities.

As world leaders get ready to meet in New York for the UN Secretary General’s Climate Summit later this month, a new report from NGOs warns climate change is rapidly becoming the greatest threat to those in poverty and is a major obstacle to poverty eradication.

Written by CAFOD, CARE International, Christian Aid, Greenpeace, Practical Action and WWF-UK the report highlights the crucial role a new set of Sustainable Development Goals must play in meeting the climate challenge.

As, Jim Yong Kim, President of the World Bank, says: “if we don’t confront climate change, we won’t end poverty.”

Loretta Minghella, Christian Aid Chief Executive said:

It is poor and marginalised people who are most vulnerable to the impact of climate change, suffering the loss of their homes, jobs, crops – and even lives. Developing countries must not be deprived of the opportunity of progress. Instead, the goals must signpost how that can be achieved without making climate change worse. Crucial to this is supporting the changes to energy and other key sectors to keep temperature rises below 2oC.

The goals must be a blueprint for low carbon development the world over, encompassing all sectors including health, agriculture, urban development, energy, water access and income generation.

Today’s report is a response to the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which showed that  climate change is one of the biggest obstacles for eradicating poverty and implementing sustainable development.

The IPCC also warned that climate change is a ‘threat multiplier’, having the most disastrous effects on those who are already vulnerable, especially the poorest sections of society.

Rising sea levels and extreme weather events, caused by global warming, will continue the cycle of poverty by destroying homes and property, seriously damaging crop yields, creating disease and displacement, and even taking lives.

By 2050, 58 million people in India and Indonesia alone be at risk from flooding as a direct result of climate change.

If climate change is not addressed, overcoming poverty will be less likely and NGOs are calling for the Sustainable Development Goals – the expected successors to the Millenium Development Goals in 2015 – to include a stand alone goal on tackling climate change.

The report also lays out a number of asks to world leaders, including adopting a low carbon development pathway, decarbonising the energy system by 2050, and ensuring global temperatures do not  rise more than 2C – the threshold at which scientists warns dangerous climate impacts will be unavoidable.

The report comes at a crucial moment for the climate movement. This month world leaders will meet in New York to discuss climate change for the first time since the 2009 Copenhagen UN climate summit.

And deadlines for both climate change and poverty eradication are fast approaching.

The next set of SDGs will be agreed on in September 2015, while a new global climate treaty is expected to be agreed in December 2015.

It is clear that the next 14 months will be a crucial opportunity to ensure that climate change is a top priority in both of these frameworks.

If climate change is not prioritised, it is likely that the next SDGs will also fail to meet their target.

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Report finds climate change a major security risk worldwide

Originally posted at tcktcktck.org

A disturbing new report released last week predicts that climate change will become a serious driver of conflict and an increasingly dangerous risk to national security.

Maplecroft, a global risk and consulting firm, assessed how well governments could respond to the threats posed by climate change—in particular climate change-related conflict and food insecurity—over the next three decades.

The report identified that serious risks to security, including epidemics and terrorist activity, will put pressure on the military and its resources as they struggle to deal with the mounting problems aggravated by climate change.

32 countries in particular are expected severely affected, among them some of the poorest and most conflict-ridden nations of the world. The top five countries most at risk were identified as Bangladesh, Sierra Leone, South Sudan, Nigeria, and Chad .

Other nations categorized as in “extreme risk” from climate change-related conflict included Haiti, Ethiopia, the Philippines, the Central African Republic, and Eritrea.

Many of these countries already suffer from high levels of inequality and have weak central governments. These conditions make it likely that terrorist groups will be able to take advantage of unstable socio-economic conditions—caused by powerless governments—in order to promote their own agendas.

Evidence of such activities can already be seen worldwide. In Nigeria, which was ranked third most vulnerable in the report, the militant Islamist group Boko Haram gained a foothold on power amid the chaos of widespread drought, food insecurity, and violent insurgency.

Oluwakemi Okenyodo, executive director of the not-for-profit CLEEN Foundation, said:

“When young people are pushed to the wall, there’s a greater chance that they will be sucked into the growing Boko Haram insurgency.”

While it is difficult to directly implicate human-caused climate change to the crisis of Nigeria, the links between climate change and political uprisings are expected to become more clear as rising temperatures and weather pattern further imperil access to food and water.

Climate change has also been linked to other conflicts. In Syria, conflict broke out following a prolonged and severe drought which displaced thousands of desperate people.

Violence and terrorism is often driven by complex circumstances that include population explosion, environmental degradation, and poverty. These hardships can be a boon to terrorist groups, who recruit new members who are dissatisfied by the status quo and see promise in extremism.

The Maplecroft report warns that increased international terrorist activity could fuel further conflicts, thus making large-scale humanitarian crises more likely.

The report, part of the findings of the seventh annual “Climate Change and Environmental Risk Atlas”, also warned that new enmities could be created globally.

As a result, vulnerable nations may call upon others to provide support in the form of aid and military resources. This will become increasingly difficult as military resources are stretched by increasing demands in the face of unpredictable conflicts and more-frequent extreme weather events.

Around the world, militaries are signally that they consider climate change to be their biggest security threat. Navy Admiral Samuel J. Locklear III—whose job it is monitor hostile activity by North Korea—stunned observers when he recently asserted in an interview that climate change was the thing most likely to cripple the security environment.

United States Secretary of State John Kerry has referred likened climate change to a “weapon of mass destruction,” while the country’s Secretary of Defense, Chuck Hagel, said last week that climate change is “critically important” to national security.