New Report: Climate Change, People and Poverty

Published July 06, 2009 @ 07:13AM PT

Back after a mostly relaxing, unpacking and furniture-moving July 4th weekend; just in time to be rudely jolted back into reality by a new Oxfam report released today on the humanitarian impacts of climate change. The report - Suffering the Science: Climate Change, People and Poverty - paints a bleak picture:

"Without action, most of the gains that the world’s poorest countries have made in development and ameliorating the harmful effects of poverty in the past 50 years will be lost, irrecoverable in the foreseeable future.

Climate change’s most savage impact on humanity in the near future is likely to be in the increase of hunger. Some of the world’s staple crops, such as maize and rice, are very susceptible to rising temperatures and to more unpredictably extreme seasons. Almost without exception, the countries with existing problems in feeding their people are those most at risk from climate change.
...
Climate-related disasters have been increasing in frequency at an extraordinary rate. Extend the line of the graph that charts such events between 1975 and 2008, and it says that in 2030 we will experience more than three times as many such disasters as today."

According to Oxfam, "26 million people have already been displaced because of climate change" - by 2050, Oxfam estimates as many as "200 million people may be on the move each year...because of hunger, environmental degradation, and loss of land."

For more information about the Oxfam report, see here. I've put together a resource page on the humanitarian impact of climate change here.

Happy Monday.

[Photo from Oxfam]

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Author

Michael has worked for NGOs in Afghanistan, across east and central Africa, and Iraq. Prior to going overseas, he worked on a project providing assistance to the United Nations on the application of International Humanitarian Law to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.