ENVIRONMENT: Guess Who Extreme Weather Hits Hardest?

By Marty Logan Reprint | | Print |

MONTREAL, Nov 2 2004 (IPS) - When it rains, it really pours on the world’s poorest.

Marginalised communities are hardest hit by drastic weather events like floods, drought and landslides. Preparing those populations to deal with the rising number of such weather events, which many experts believe signals climate change, is a growing concern: if it fails, the world’s development goals will be missed, warns a recent report.

That analysis, ‘Up in Smoke’, by a coalition of aid agencies, argues the international community’s approach to development must change radically to include consideration of the impacts of climate change.

For one, it adds, that means rich countries must aim much higher than the pledges many of them made in the Kyoto Protocol, a global agreement to cut the greenhouse gases that cause global warming.

Efforts are already underway to assist vulnerable people in the North and South adapt to changing weather.

According to the draft version of a separate study by a coalition of environment and development agencies, ”economic losses from ‘weather-related’ disasters have skyrocketed, with an estimated 432.2 billion U.S. dollar loss reported for the 1990s, up from 128.4 billion dollars in the 1980s.”

In an analysis of phase one of a project to identify how vulnerable communities adapt to ”climate variability,” and how the rest of the world can learn from those local lessons, this study suggests climate change ”threatens to exacerbate existing vulnerabilities and create new ones for the poor.”

”These new vulnerabilities may include loss of livelihoods through increased extreme events, displacement by sea-level rise and coastal inundation, food insecurity due to changes in temperature and rainfall patterns and falling crop yields … and a deepening poverty cycle associated with diversion of livelihood assets towards recovery and coping, to name a few.”

”These are people who live on lands that are naturally fragile, marginal lands,” says Erika Spanger-Siegfried of the Stockholm Environment Institute – Boston Centre (SEI-B), commenting on three case studies her group and a partner organisation in Sudan prepared for the draft report.

The other partners that helped produce the draft, titled ‘Sustainable Livelihoods and Climate Change Adaptation’, are The World Conservation Union (IUCN), the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) and the Swiss Organisation for Development and Cooperation (Intercooperation).

The communities studied by SEI-B and its local partner, the Sudan Higher Council for Environment and Natural Resources (HCENR), ”have become in many cases more marginalised due to converting rangelands, grasslands, to farmland,” says Spanger-Siegfried.

”There is this draw down of the natural resource base for survival, for subsistence, like the overuse of rangeland … and it’s that that is really compounding that condition of vulnerability.”

”These are poor countries and people are vulnerable not only because of the likelihood of drought but also because of their socio-economic status,” she adds.

One case study looked at a project that included the United Nations Global Environment Facility (GEF) and 17 villages in Sudan’s western Bara province, whose people were asked to suggest and then help develop methods to rehabilitate the overexploited rangelands in the drought-hit region.

For example, says Spanger-Siegfried in a telephone interview, locals were given incentives to replace herds of goats with sheep, because the latter have a smaller impact on rangelands and provide villagers with more options for setting up cottage industries, such as making wool.

Based on a survey of changes to people’s household assets and access to assets after the GEF project ended, ”the community seemed to say (the changes) had the net effect to increase their capacity to deal with drought and to be much more resilient in the face of it,” she adds.

”They had alternative options for bringing in income, for getting credit and starting over, for planting a different type of crop, for storing grains, for women’s irrigated gardens, access to markets – things of that nature.”

The draft study concluded that keys to successfully adapting to climate variability include: a thorough understanding of local livelihoods and vulnerabilities; community-driven implementation; community organisation; strong participation of women; local training and capacity building; and blending traditional and modern approaches.

‘Up in Smoke’ also argues that environmental and scientific measures are insufficient responses to climate change.

”Poverty causes insecurity and vulnerability and reduces people’s ability to cope and to adapt. Today, humanity faces the intertwined challenges of obscene levels of poverty and a rapidly warming global climate,” it says.

”There is no either/or approach possible,” adds the report, published in October. ”The world must meet both its commitments to achieve the MDGs (Millennium Development Goals) and tackle climate change. The two are inextricably linked.”

The MDGs, agreed by all 191 U.N. member nations, set ambitious targets, such as halving the amount of people who live on less than a dollar a day and providing primary schooling to all the world’s children, all by 2015.

They also pledge to “promote gender equality and empower women,” specifically by ending gender disparity in education at all levels, also by 2015.

‘Up In Smoke’, released by The Working Group on Climate Change and Development, which includes: ActionAid International, Institute of Development Studies (IDS), Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and the new economics foundation (nef), points out climate change will hit women hardest.

”Women who have to find food for their families will find it more difficult if climate change lowers rainfall and increases drought in their home area … changing weather patterns could also affect farming activities such as paddy cultivation in Asia, and cash crops such as cotton and tea, the cultivation of which employs many women.”

”Following extreme events such as storms and floods, the burden of devastation falls primarily on women who must keep the family together,” it adds.

Among other things, the report recommends: ”a global risk assessment of the likely costs of adaptation to climate change in poor countries; development models based on risk reduction and incorporating community driven coping strategies,” and ”co-ordinated plans … for relocating threatened communities with appropriate political, legal and financial resources.”