Climate
Change Threatens
World Aid Effort
By Michael McCarthy
21 October 2004
The
Independent
Britain's
development and aid agencies joined together yesterday to recognise
formally that climate change is the most serious problem facing the
poor of the world.
In a new report
on the effects of global warming on developing nations,Up In Smoke,
a coalition of 18 aid and green groups, from Oxfam and Action Aid to
Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, agreed that the warming climate
could wipe out all the hard-won development gains of the past half century,
and that poor countries would suffer worst of all.
This was a significant
shift in position for the development movement, parts of which have
in the past seen environmental concerns as a side issue, compared with
the immediate and pressing task of relieving mass poverty in Africa
and other developing regions. But the agencies said yesterday they could
no longer ignore their own evidence that the effects of global warming
were already being directly felt by the world's poorest people and countries.
They are being seen
in changing rainfall patterns, severer droughts and, in particular,
in the increase in extreme weather events, which are predicted to be
one of climate change's most damaging features. "Food production,
water supplies, public health and people's livelihoods are all being
damaged and undermined," the report said. "We fear that global
warming could threaten the attainment of the Millennium Development
Goals and even reverse human development achievements.
"The devastation
caused by Hurricane Mitch that hit Central America in 1998, or the 2004
floods in Bangladesh and India, show that an acute danger now exists
for many. The slow, hard-won gains in human development of the last
few decades, in places, these could be swept away in hours."
The report called
for a global risk assessment of the likely costs of adapting to climate
change in developing countries something that has never been done
and said that rich nations should put up "commensurate"
funds for measures such as flood defences. It recommended that in future
all development projects should bedone with the possible effects of
global warming very much in mind. They should be "climate-proof"
and "climate-friendly".
Rajendra Pachauri,
chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
who wrote the foreword to the report, said that agricultural research
for developing nations would have to change significantly.
Much of it, Dr Pachauri
said, was still "unfortunately" focused on "green revolution"
crops strainsthat give ever-increasing yields but now there
would need to be a focus on crops that could resist the changes that
are going to take place, such as drought-resistant and salt-tolerant
varieties.
Yet the most significant
thing about the report was that it was being issued at all, as in the
past a number of leading figures in the development movement, up to
ministerial level, have regarded environmental concerns such as climate
change as merely a distraction.
Several developmentalists
at the launch agreed that some of their number had been slow to accept
the significance of global warming, the science of which has been in
the public domain for nearly 15 years.
Andy Atkins, the
advocacy director of Tearfund, which operates in 60 countries, said:
"I think it's come fairly late to some, but I also think there's
a question of also having to wait for a moment. We're not scientists.
We wait for the evidence that poor communities are being affected, and
we could have predicted that on the basis of science perhaps many years
ago, but we weren't yet seeing the evidence. We are now, and as development
agencies we cannot ignore it."
Antonio Hill, global
environment adviser for Oxfam, made a similar point. "It's not
just about science any more, it's about social science, and that's where
development agencies actually have something to say."
Andrew Sims, of
the New Economics Foundation, which co-ordinated the report with the
International Institute for Environment and Development, said he thought
that parts of the development movement had woken up late to the climate
threat because people had simply concentrated on their own specialities
and not seen the bigger picture.
"I think they
have been sitting in their silos for too long," he said. "But
there's an awareness now that the issue has arrived. People have joined
up the dots on climate change and they realise how things are. I'm celebrating
the fact that everybody's here now."