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The Rich/Poor Divide
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Kenya's Climate Change Water Crisis Impacts Hospital Maternal Care |
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Tuesday 13 July 2010 by: Gitonga Njeru | Women News Network | Report Kakamega, Kenya - At the Kakamega Provincial District General Hospital, located in Western Kenya, access to adequate and clean water still remains a pipe dream.* Even though the need is critical the hospital, which works with maternity medicine and birthing procedures for women, still lacks an adequate plumbing system for water. These conditions and others are only made worse by frequent and severe water shortages in Kenya. “One-third of the people in Africa live in drought-prone areas and are vulnerable to the impacts of droughts,” predicted the World Water Forum in 2000. The Kakamega’s hospital staff admits that problems of water shortages are common. Because of this, women and children are especially vulnerable as they face the destructive effects of unsafe water. “As women constitute the largest percentage of the world’s poorest people, they are most affected by these changes. Children and youth – especially girls – and elderly women, are often the most vulnerable,” says BRIDGE, a research and information program that is part of (IDS) the Institute of Development Studies – Knowledge Services. With the negative effects of climate change rising, experts predict that the biggest challenge in the coming years for a majority of the world’s people will be the ability to access clean, healthy and safe water. Should access to clean water be considered a human right? Rights defenders worldwide answer with a strong, “Yes!” Even though the consensus agrees, water figures currently show that resources and water supplies are declining quickly as global temperatures continue to rise and water sources are literally beginning to “evaporate.” |
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Bolivia Throws Down Gauntlet, Demands Real Climate Action |
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Wednesday 05 May 2010 by: Max Ajl, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis It was a rounding error: 3, 3.5 million dollars, the amount of funding in climate aid that the United States had taken away from Bolivia, in explicit retribution for Bolivia's filibuster at the Copenhagen Summit this past December, when along with Venezuela, the Sudan, Nicaragua and Ecuador, it effectively scuppered the Copenhagen accords. Remember Copenhagen? The Copenhagen treaty would have locked what passed for agreed upon terms into a legally binding agreement. An agreement that wouldn't have bound anyone to do anything at all except toss around a couple billion dollars in transfers from the developed to the underdeveloped world, a thousandth of what we spent on bank bailouts. The negotiators mumbled about a "goal" of keeping global warming below two degrees Celsius, but without enforcement mechanisms, without specifying emissions cuts, without apportioning responsibility and without adequate financing mechanisms. A vague, do-nothing treaty would have been fantastic for an American government that has categorically "reject [ed] [any] sense of guilt or culpability or reparations" for past emissions, in the words of climate envoy Todd Stern. Now, scientists confirm the worst: "Current pledges mean a greater than 50% chance that warming will exceed 3°C by 2100." Copenhagen wasn't an agreement to stop climate change. It was an agreement to stop the stopping of climate change. "It is amazing how unambitious these pledges are," Potsdam Institute researchers comment in the flagship science journal Nature. Even now, waves lap at the cities of the Maldives and the Seychelles. They will soon be submerged. Climate-related wars wrack Africa. If warming continues unimpeded, swathes of the Horn of Africa may lose 94 percent of their agricultural production. According to some estimates, Senegal will lose over 80 percent of its agricultural production, as will the Sudan. When political pressure fails, the United States government chooses a different weapon from its arsenal. The first back-up device is economic blackmail. Stern has politely explained to The Washington Post, "the US is going to use its funds to go to countries that have indicated an interest to be part of the accord." Lumumba Di-Aping, the courageously stubborn Sudanese negotiator whose face contorted in tears at Copenhagen as he contemplated millions of African deaths, sees this as bribery, saying, "We will see in the next few months a checkbook diplomacy," as the US threatens cash-strapped developing countries with aid cut-offs to get them to sign the Copenhagen document. |
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Climate Equity: A Lost Cause? |
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Friday 30 April 2010 by: Craig Collin, t r u t h o u t | Op-Ed The message delivered by the poor nations and climate activists who gathered last week in Bolivia is undeniably just: The world desperately needs an effective climate agreement. However, rich countries are primarily responsible for causing this problem and have reaped most of benefits of two centuries of fossil-fueled industrialization. Therefore, they must bear most of the costs of responding to climate change and overcoming the world's addiction to fossil fuels. Only the callous or ethically challenged would dispute this position on moral grounds. Who can doubt that the carbon emissions disrupting Earth's climate are the gaseous refuse of a modernization process that has enriched a handful of nations? The Souththern Hemisphere's demand for equity, of course, can also be leveled at the fast lane, energy-guzzling jet-setters in every country whose opulent lifestyles clog the atmosphere with climate-altering carbon. If justice requires polluters to shoulder the cost of cleanup and compensate victims for their losses, then rich elites and wealthy nations must take the primary responsibility for halting climate chaos and rectifying the damage it causes. But even though the South's case for climate justice is ethically sound, it may be politically doomed. The call for atmospheric equity emanating from Cochabamba will be either ignored or distorted by Washington and the Western press. It's best to plug your ears and turn a blind eye if you don't have a leg to stand on. But indifference and denial are not the main reasons the quest for climate justice has scant hope of success. Power, not morality, is the currency of international politics. In the corridors of power, the moral high ground is worthless without real leverage to back it up. And when it comes to climate change, the South has very little leverage to wrest justice from the North. |
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Bolivia Climate Change Talks to Give Poor a Voice |
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Go to Original April 18, 2010 By Andres Schipani and John Vidal | Guardian Groups on frontline of global warming head to alternative summit in city of Cochabamba Rafael Quispe is gearing up for his trip. He packs a small leather bag, puts on his black poncho, an alpaca scarf sporting the rainbow-coloured, chequered Andean indigenous flag and his black hat. "This will be an important gathering, a very important gathering. It is about saving our Mother Earth, about saving nature," he says. Quispe, an Aymara indigenous leader, is heading for Bolivia's central city of Cochabamba for the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, the grassroots alternative to last year's ill-fated UN talks in Copenhagen. At least 15,000 people from worldwide indigenous movements and civil-society groups, as well as presidents, scientists, activists and observers from 90 governments, are expected to attend what is being called the "Woodstock" of climate change summits. "According to some analyses, about 80% of the world's pollution comes from developed nations and harms, mostly, developing nations. So we feel we have to do something, we must be heard, we must be compensated," says Quispe, who last December lobbied the case of his community at Copenhagen. "The COP15 was a total failure, so brother President Evo Morales has decided to call for this climate change conference to do something about it. We the people are the ones that should take the lead on how to tackle the climate crisis," says Quispe.
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Forests May Depend on Survival of Native People |
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Go to Original Monday 29 March 2010 by: Stephen Leahy | Inter Press Service Montpellier, France - After the failures in Copenhagen to agree on a new climate protection treaty, and more recently at the Doha meetings on trade in endangered species to prevent bluefin tuna from going extinct, indigenous forest communities may offer examples of sensible governance for shared resources on a small planet. Hundreds of poor Mexican Zapotec indigenous farmers have become owners of a multi-million-dollar diversified forest industry, offering an important model of a community-based enterprise that supports local people and conserves the natural environment, says David Barton Bray, a professor and associate chair in the Department of Earth and Environment at Florida International University in Miami. The farmers of Ixtlán de Juarez, a forest community in the Sierra Norte mountains of central Mexico, utilise their strong traditional community values and communal ownership of more than 21,000 hectares of pine and oak forest to run a successful business that benefits the entire community. There is no private property, and rather than establishing a business to maximise profits, the people of Ixtlán, and in other Zapotec communities of Mexico with similar forest-based enterprises, focus on job creation, reducing emigration to cities and enhancing the overall well-being of the community, Bray told participants at the Smallholder and Community Forestry conference here in Montpellier. |
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Carbon Footprint is a measure of the impact human activities have on the environment in terms of the amount of green house gases produced, measured in units of carbon dioxide. |
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