One Big Problem

The below post is from Harriet Riley in response to TOTO Challenge #1

The Poor Poor Polar Bears: Far from being a problem for other species, climate change is already robbing people in developing nations of their homes and livlihoods

It’s good to be back in Copenhagen for the COP15. This is the place I came to two years ago trying to answer one simple question; how do you run a functional society? Being happy, prosperous and good-looking to boot is something the Danes have always been famous for, and this stable home-life has freed them up to play advocate on the international stage for more generous aid projects and green development. No doubt these were the people to answer my question. But my quest left me mildly unsatisfied –it was one of those ‘simple’ questions, after all, the type that only the United Nations, ancient Greek philosophers and myself ever seem to bother with– and I’m hoping that this time, at the climate summit, I can find a better answer.

In early 2008 I found myself seated with 99 other bright-eyed young people in an airy lecture theatre of the CPH Business School. We are attending the Copenhagen Consensus Youth Forum hosted by the infamous Bjørn Lomborg of ‘Sceptical Environmentalist’ fame. In front of us, a panel of Nobel Prize winning economists nodded and hummed as they tried to explain, in terms we would understand, just what was wrong with our complicated world.

The debate ended in a way that seemed all too amicable for a question of that magnitude. The economists’ task had been to rank ten threats, all very real and very destructive challenges facing the global community, in the order in which we should spend money on stopping them. The threats were hunger and malnutrition, terrorism, conflict, subsidies and trade barriers, water and sanitation, disease, women’s rights, education, air pollution, and climate change. The idea was to get the most bang for our international buck; little investment, big return. In other words, what’s the least we can do to save the most lives?

At first, this economically rationalist approach seems sensible; fortifying food aid with basic vitamin nutrients and improving agriculture in developing nations are cheep and effective lifesavers, so hunger and malnutrition get ranked as the number one priority. Diseases like malaria can be cured with $1 bed nets, so they get second place. To halt climate change before it destroys society, meanwhile, would require a total re-do of the global economic system. That’s an expensive option, so it gets ranked last on our planetary shopping list, to be purchased if we have to money left over from our other projects.

But hang on, you’re thinking; climate change needs to be dealt with now if we’re going to stop it before it gets out of hand. Yes, and to be completely honest with you, that ‘now’ is about a five year window, in which we have to halt all our greenhouse gas emissions, full stop. Using the Copenhagen Consensus approach is a bit like saying ‘we’ll buy a roof for the house if we’ve got the money left over from buying a nice dinner table to go under it.’ But surely that was too obvious to point out to Nobel Prize winners, let alone all these clever young people now passing a microphone from hand to hand, so each could offer their two cents.

There was Bulgar from Mongolia, who lamented the plight of small nations out-traded by their superpower neighbours; there was Oshi from Ghana who despaired at wars soaking up natural resources; and Taylor from the United States who bemoaned the use of self-terminating seeds by industrial agribusiness. They argued their national case studies well, but I, the sole representative of the entire Oceanic continent, was finding it difficult to pinpoint exactly what was doing us, let alone all the other continents too, the most harm. Everything seemed to contribute to making every other thing worse. Bad water and sanitation meant more disease. A lack of gender equality meant poorer maternal heath. Conflict encouraged terrorism, encouraged conflict, and limited education left everyone sicker, hungrier and angrier. Why were we separating these problems when they so obviously fed each other, created each other?

And climate change, oh climate change was not just the icing on the cake, it seemed to have become the cake itself, like brandy soaked through a Christmas pudding and set alight. It was going to increase the range of malaria-baring mosquitos tenfold. It was going destroy two thirds of the world’s arable land. Far from making poverty history in the 21st century, climate change was going to open up a whole new age of need.

So that’s my unfinished business in Copenhagen, I want to make the point to every diplomat, every activist, and every academic that I meet patrolling the barricades; these are not separate problems. Climate change and poverty, along with everything on the list from the Copenhagen Consensus, form an interlocking lacework of challenges entangling the world like a spiders web. It’s as if today, thanks to the legacy of colonialism, two world wars and the global financial system we’re facing one big self-creating crisis.

So lets take a look at some of the ways that problem works. There’s the local level; the immediate effects that climate change will have on those living in poverty, and then there’s the global level; the ways in which poverty and poorer nations are speeding up climate change.

The Local
How climate change leads to poverty

The World health organisation estimates that 150 000 people are dying each year as a direct result of climate change. These deaths are caused by disease, sea level rise, heatwaves, natural disaster and starvation. That’s the thing about climate change, its effects are so varied that, in theory, by the end of the next decade it could have destroyed the livelihood of nearly every person below the poverty line in the developing world. The best way to explore these permutations is to focus on one group of people, for example, women.

The United Nations Population Fund recently released a report on women and climate change, which demonstrates the way in which an already disempowered group suffers first and most when crisis strikes. Women constitute the majority of the world’s agricultural workforce, and it is through a loss of agricultural productivity that our species will feel the most basic, and dangerous effects of climate change. Women’s vulnerability stems from their lack of ownership over resources and a lack of formal education, leaving them more likely to be displaced from the land they depend upon.
While men with transferable skills and an education can migrate to find work, women are left behind to combine domestic duties with a second job in the community. When clean water becomes harder to find in a drought, it is the women who must search further a field to feed their dependants. Typically, it is girls who are pulled out of school to help with this task. Lowered nutrition levels and unclean water mean the family is more susceptible to disease, problems that are again magnified by the threat of extreme weather. And who would have thought that climate change could influence the prevalence of HIV/AIDS? As farms collapse, men from rural areas leave to find work in the cities, returning HIV positive. Meanwhile, women turn to prostitution to pay for food. The more people become mobile because of the crisis, the more the disease spreads.

In societies with entrenched gender inequities, women cannot gain access to the decision making bodies responsible for dealing with climate change, meaning there are very few chances for them to play a part in addressing the issue.
But solutions do exist, and NGOs from around the world including ActionAid, are working with local people to enhance their own adaptive capacity.

Women from Bangladesh to Papua New Guinea have started using the one form of capital they have in abundance, each other, to form community climate response networks. These networks have panted mangrove barriers to stop storm surges, put houses on stilts in flood prone areas and developed arid agricultural techniques to deal with drought. Taking turns to monitor the radio for extreme weather warnings, and researching what’s in store for next year’s crops, they have also devised evacuation strategies for their villages. For some the empowerment that comes from tackling climate change may be the first step out of poverty. When communities pull together in the face of a crisis, they have the potential to tackle other challenges too, such as their long-term education and health options.

The Global
How poverty leads to climate change

No wonder nutting out a treaty like Kyoto’s replacement in Copenhagen is so tricky; to really solve climate change, we need to solve poverty, and vice versa. The poorer a person is, the less choice they have about their occupation. In many developing nations, from South East Asia to Africa, felling trees for firewood and clearing forest for agricultural land are the only sources of income available. This depletes precious carbon sinks and releases more CO2 into the atmosphere. In a lot of ways, this local survival strategy mirrors the behaviour of their governments at the international climate talks. Developing countries are known as Annex IIs, and they have argued that they need fossil fuels to raise their people out of poverty. Under the Kyoto Protocol, they were under no obligation whatsoever to cut their carbon, in spite of China being the world’s largest emitter. Instead, Annex II nations have only to put forward projects for the Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs), in which Annex I, meaning rich nations, pay for projects overseas, such as reafforestation or wind farms, which will allow them to emit more at home.

The problem with these Mechanisms is that the projects being payed for are often already in development. Rich nations also use them to avoid making changes to their own industries, and meet their reduction targets by paying foreign businesses to run CDMs. All this results in no net reduction of emissions, and no actual development. The same looks likely to happen in the new treaty, with Annex II nations refusing to participate unless wealthy countries pay for them to do so. Technology transfer to small African and South American states makes good sense, but it’s little wonder that Europe and America are unhappy about footing the bill for China, India and Brazil’s promised eco-revolutions.

On top of this, it was recently revealed that rich nations are double-booking their aid budgets for the Copenhagen Summit, promising to fund climate adaptation in developing nations with money already set aside for poverty alleviation. NGOs were outraged and have launched a campaign targeting the host nation Denmark, demanding that they set an example by ensuring their contribution to international adaptation funds is not drawn from the same coffers as their aid budget. It’s a sensible demand, but one that’s not likely to be met. The Scandinavians, along with the Netherlands, are currently the only nations meeting the globally agreed target of 0.7% of GDP for foreign aid, which should place in perspective just how difficult it will be to convince Annex I nations to give still more to fund climate adaptation.

The only argument that might convince stingy governments, rich and poor alike, is a principle we learned in high school economics, that a stich in time almost always saves nine. The sooner they spend up on climate adaptation and mitigation, the less they have to pay in the future. The maintenance costs for our planet –its people and the ecosystems that sustain them– increase each year that they are left to degrade, meaning that a big spend on climate change now would save money in the long term when the problem gets worse.

This was one of the key conclusions drawn by Lord Stern in his famous report; pay now, or pay a helluva lot more later. And there is another argument, too. The Stern report did not include an assessment of the profits, the global income if you like, that would derive from an increase in productivity brought about by better health, education and gender equity in developing nations. In other words, green action has the potential to make money and, need it be said, improve quality of life for billions worldwide.

So, how do we help our governments to realise this? By using the same techniques campaigners and concerned citizens have always used; our votes, our consumption choices, and taking action through NGOs. That’s what I’m in Copenhagen to do, work with an NGO and, of course, answer my question about functional societies. Based on the way women in Bangladesh are stepping up to the climate challenge, as well as on the tight knit teams here at the COP15, I’d hazard a guess that it has something to do with working together. One big problem; one big community solution.