Email
Print
Joanisa Kamid, aged 11, and her classmates from Makad village in the Philippines, have to wade across a river as part of their three-kilometre walk to school. Climate change has contributed to the river's unpredictable flow and sometimes lethal currents. Joanisa's brother Jumar is among four children who have drowned on their way to school since 1986. Photo: Tom Greenwood/OxfamGB.
Fight climate poverty
After three decades of brutal and bloody tribal violence, communities in Papua New Guinea’s Highlands region are now powerful advocates for peace, as Editor Maureen Bathgate discovered during a recent visit.
At the Bali United Nations Climate Change Conference, in the early hours of Saturday morning, after two weeks of intense negotiations, government ministers and officials tried to hammer out a deal long after the scheduled end of climate change negotiations.
The muted atmosphere of the Bali conference centre was rudely interrupted however by an unlikely sound. Reggae music was blaring out on a portable stereo. In the atrium of the conference centre, delegates were dancing beneath a sign that read “small islands drowning our sorrows before we drown.” In Bali, it became evident that it is people, and not just polar bears, that are losing their homes and lives because of climate change.
Governments around the world set off for Bali in December 2007 with a public mandate to tackle climate change. The phrase “the world is watching” rarely seemed so apt. And while the conference was never going to meet public expectations in full — this was a meeting not to conclude negotiations, but to start them — the meeting did agree to a “Bali roadmap”.
The roadmap guarantees a process for concrete action on climate change continuing after 2012 when the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol expires. It sets the stage for addressing fairness where all countries will have to limit emissions. But rich countries will have to kick the carbon habit first and poor countries need to see them do it.
But Bali should have achieved more. Some of the most crucial decisions were fudged in ambiguous language. For example, scientific analysis recommended that global greenhouse gas emissions be cut by at least 50% below 1990 levels by 2050, in order to keep temperature rise below 2ºC, and avoid the most dangerous climate impacts. But this is not in the final document for the Bali roadmap; nor is the near-term target to reduce emissions in 2020 by 25–40% from 1990 levels — it is only referenced as an indirect guideline for the forthcoming negotiations.
This is disappointing for poor and vulnerable people around the world whose lives hang in the balance. Just talk to anyone from a low-lying island in the Pacific already threatened by expanding seas and salt water inundation, such as the Carteret Islands in Papua New Guinea
For more than 20 years, Carteret Islanders have fought against the intruding Pacific Ocean, building sea walls and planting mangroves in an effort to combat rising sea levels. In just two decades, the islands’ shoreline has receded by 18–20 metres. During storms and high tides, saltwater washes away homes, destroys vegetable gardens, contaminates fresh water supplies and seeps through the land.
For a population of 2,500, who rely on growing their own food to survive, the impact has been devastating. The islands’ highest point lies just 1.5 metres above sea level and once-fertile farmland has been destroyed. The islanders are living on borrowed time — the islands are expected to be completely submerged within 10–15 years — they have no alternative but to relocate to designated land on Bougainville island, nearly 130km away, a process which has been stalled.
“For the Carteret Islanders, we cannot wait any longer because the islands are shrinking,” says Ursula Rakova, who owns land on Huene Island, which is now split in two and disappearing fast.
“Right now, it is high tide, it is monsoon time. So basically, the sea is seeping through the land and we cannot grow any food anymore. We have lost our food system. We have to survive on coconut or fish.
“Carteret Islanders have been living on the islands for centuries. To move we will be losing our identity...losing our cultural aspect of life. Basically, it means losing our life.
“Our message to the leaders...is they will need to look at smaller communities, especially in the Pacific, who are going under. We need help so that we can relocate our people to enable them to live a sustainable life in the future.
“We don’t need talk, talk, talk. Our situation is before us. We need something tangible.”
“...adapting to climate change in developing countries will cost at least $50 billion annually, and far more if global greenhouse gas emissions are not cut fast enough.”
At the Bali conference, Oxfam released a report entitled Adaptation Financing: Why the Bali UN Climate Conference must mandate the search for new funds, which called on the world’s richest countries, including Australia, to commit to funding that will help poor countries adapt to climate change.
The report estimates that adapting to climate change in developing countries will cost at least $50 billion annually, and far more if global greenhouse gas emissions are not cut fast enough. Australia’s share of this global amount is around $ 1.65 billion.
Oxfam’s goal is to see an end to poverty and injustice around the world. However, it is the world’s poor communities who are least responsible for climate change that are being hit first and hardest by its impacts. They are losing their livelihoods and land to more frequent and severe floods, storms, cyclones and droughts and rising sea levels. They cannot and must not be expected to shoulder the costs thrust upon them by the developed world. If we are to continue working to reduce poverty around the world then we must also tackle climate change.
This means pressing rich countries to shoulder the responsibility — they must take immediate action to drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and they must finance poor countries to adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change. And in achieving these aims it means ensuring that all actions are fair and equitable and give priority to poor people’s needs and that any decisions involve the most vulnerable countries.
“The challenge of climate change is global and needs a global solution, not one concocted only by those countries most responsible for causing the problem,” Oxfam Australia’s Executive Director Andrew Hewett says.
“Dollars for clean energy and adaptation in developing countries need to be additional to current aid flows.
Most importantly, such funds must be tied to international commitments and coupled with mandatory emission cuts. If the world fails to act in cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the costs and the consequences will only get worse.”
As an organisation, we are committed to helping poor communities reduce their vulnerability to climate change through work on sustainable development, disaster preparedness, and appropriate adaptation. We are also undertaking research in developing countries to learn more about climate change impacts and adaptation and will continue to lobby the Australian Government to demonstrate global leadership on climate change, commit to deep emission cuts, contribute its fair share to the global adaptation fund and lead the way in developing carbon-free energy sources.
Climate change is an issue that affects us all, and we all have a part to play in tackling it. For without everyone’s efforts in the climate change challenge, we cannot hope to achieve all that needs to be done, in the short time we have to do it.
Oxfam activists dressed as polar bears shout the slogan "humans need help too", to highlight the fact that both humans and animals are under threat from climate change, during a demonstration outside the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali. Photo: AFP PHOTO/Jewel Samad.