Climate change effects, such as extreme weather events, drive up environmental remediation costs. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jul 22 2014 (IPS)

Extreme poverty and hunger can be eliminated, but only through far greater efforts to reduce carbon emissions that are overheating the planet and producing punishing droughts, catastrophic floods and ever wilder weather, said climate activists involved in talks to set the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Last weekend, the United Nations released the 17 draft SDGs following a year and a half of discussion by more than 60 countries participating in the voluntary process."You can’t climb out of poverty if you have to rebuild your home every other year." -- Harjeet Singh

The SDGs are a set of goals and targets intended to eliminate extreme poverty and pursue sustainable development. When finalised in 2015, at the expiration of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the SDGs are intended to be the roadmap for countries to follow in making environmental, social and economic policies and decisions.

“Disasters are a major reason many of the MDG goals will not be met,” said Harjeet Singh of ActionAid International, an NGO based in Johannesburg.

“A big flood or typhoon can set a region’s development back 20 years,” Singh, ActionAid’s international coordinator of disaster risk reduction, told IPS.

Last year’s Super Typhoon Haiyan killed more than 6,000 people and left nearly two million homeless in the Philippines, he said. Less than a year earlier, the Philippines was hit by Typhoon Bopha, which killed more than 1,000 people and caused an estimated 350 million dollars in damage.

In the past two weeks, the country was struck by two destructive typhoons. The Philippines may face another 20 before the end of typhoon season.

“Everything is affected by disasters — food security, health, education, infrastructure and so on. You can’t climb out of poverty if you have to rebuild your home every other year,” Singh said.

Goals for poverty elimination or nearly anything else in the proposed SDGs are “meaningless without reductions in carbon emissions”, he said.

Carbon emissions from burning oil, coal and gas are trapping heat from the sun. The amount of this extra heat-energy is like exploding 400,000 Hiroshima atomic bombs per day 365 days per year, according to James Hansen, a climate scientist and former head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. As a result the entire planet is now 0.8 C hotter.

“All weather events are affected by climate change because the environment in which they occur is warmer and moister than it used to be,” Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado previously told IPS.

Climate change doesn’t necessarily cause weather disasters but it certainly makes them worse, said Trenberth, an expert on extreme events.

Climate and low-carbon development pathways need to be fully reflected in the SDGs, said  Bernadette Fischler, co-chair of Beyond 2015 UK. Beyond 2015 is a coalition of more than 1,000 civil society organisations working for a strong and effective set of SDGs.

“Climate change is an urgent issue and needs to be highly visible in the SDGs,” Fischler told IPS.

In the current SDG draft climate is goal 13. It calls on countries to “take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts”. There is no target to reduce emissions, and nearly all of the targets are about adapting to the coming climate impacts.

“Countries don’t want to pre-empt their positions in the U.N. climate change negotiations,” said Lina Dabbagh of the Climate Action Network, a global network of environmental NGOs.

The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCCC) involves every country in a negotiation to create a new global climate treaty in 2015. After five years of talks, countries are deadlocked on key issues.

“The SDGs are a huge opportunity to move forward on climate, but the climate goal is weak and there is no action agenda,” Dabbagh told IPS.

Finalising the SDGs draft was highly politicised, resulting in very cautious wording. The country alliances and divisions are remarkably similar to those in the UNFCCC negotiations, including the South-North divide, she said.

Every country is concerned about climate change and its impacts but there is wide disagreement on how this should be reflected in the SDGs, with some only wanting a mention in the preamble, said Fischler.

Some countries such as the United Kingdom think 17 goals is too many and it is possible that some will be cut during the final year of negotiations that start once the SDGs are formally introduced at the U.N. General Assembly on Sep. 24.

The day before that the U.N. secretary-general will host a Climate Summit with leaders of many countries in attendance. The summit is intended to kick-start political momentum for an ambitious, global, legal climate treaty in 2015.

“Civil society will make a big push during the summit to make climate an integral part of the SDGs,” said Dabbagh.

However, much work remains to help political leaders and the public understand that climate action is the key to eliminating extreme poverty and achieving sustainable development, she said.

Participants in CBA-7 taking part in a brainstorming session. Credit: Naimul Haq/IPS

By Naimul Haq
DHAKA, May 7 2013 (IPS)

Adaptation and mitigation. Identified by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and by scientists as the two major responses to address the problem, these were also the twin preoccupations of a climate change conference held recently in Dhaka.

Some 200 environmentalists, scientists, policymakers, academics, government and non-government officials as well as international development partners converged on the capital city of Bangladesh to discuss ways community-based adaptation (CBA) could be made more holistic, incorporating sectors such as food, water, education, health, energy, livelihood opportunities, poverty reduction and social mobilisation.

A joint initiative of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS) – a research, policy and implementation organisation in Dhaka – and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a UK-based think-tank which works in partnership with fellow organisations in Africa, Asia and Latin America, the Dhaka plenary was the seventh edition of the CBA conference or CBA-7.

“As time goes by, climate change impacts will only get more severe,” Atiq Rahman, executive director of BCAS and co-chair of the Climate Action Network South Asia, told IPS. “If the industrialised nations do not take their roles seriously, then it could lead to catastrophic consequences.”

Speaker after speaker underlined the urgency of addressing the needs of communities vulnerable to climate change. There was not a moment to be lost, they emphasised: the time to act was now.

“It is a race against time,” said Tracy Kajumba, a capacity-building and advocacy coordinator for the Africa Climate Change Resilience Alliance (ACCRA) in Uganda.

“The earlier we get into action, the better it will be. Otherwise, the cost of adaptation will only become higher, leading to population displacement, conflict and increased poverty, and hence huge global tensions,” she commented to IPS.

World leaders also needed to invest more, both in terms of commitment and funds, the experts agreed.

“The world leaders had promised to limit the global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius by the end of this century,” Rahman said. “Unfortunately, that has already been
superseded.”

“Honestly speaking,” Susan Nanduddu of the Development Network of Indigenous Voluntary Associations in Uganda remarked to IPS, “the rich nations do not have the will to respond to the damages made by climate change.”

Neither the will, nor the money, it seems. Simon Anderson, head of the IIED climate change group, told IPS, “Many countries affected by climate change have not yet received the proportion or scale of global climate funds to respond to the needs of adaptation strategies. This is a global failure.”

“There is a huge investment gap,” Rahman agreed, “and until that is met, there will be serious political tensions which will lead to conflicts.”

Global efforts – and funds – needed to be channelled mainly in two directions, the experts felt: adaptation strategies to reduce the vulnerability of communities, and the scaling up of mitigation efforts to combat the ever-growing threat of global warming.

“I am afraid the world leaders are not doing enough to focus on the need for adaptation strategies,” Saskia Daggett, ACCRA international coordinator, told IPS. “The funds are the biggest challenge here, and there are huge gaps.”

Kajumba too urged world leaders to make sure adaptation and mitigation interventions were uppermost in all their funding and programme priorities.

But until the funds started coming in, there was something else that could be done, Nanduddu proposed. “Every year you have negotiations for funds to address climate change but the trickledown result is insignificant. So communities have to wake up and do something on their own.”

This means scaling up CBA activities to involve more and more affected communities, in order to build capacity and reduce climate change-induced risks, she said.

“We are not making the most of our opportunities,” Nanduddu stated. “This platform is a real chance to recognise voices and make everything fairer and accessible to those who suffer the most.”

Such scaling up would involve the restructuring and modification of successful adaptation programmes, for them to be implemented in similar environments. These could be areas of saline water intrusion, extreme drought, severe cyclones, water-logging and devastating floods or riverbank erosion.

However, developing the design, demonstration and implementation of all CBA programmes in an organised way would require massive coordination and mobilisation. Hence, the need for a multi-pronged strategy.

For one, it could involve local government agencies entering into more serious interactions with communities and taking lessons from their adaptation initiatives.

The knowledge generated could then be integrated and intensified with CBA initiatives. In turn, these could be used as approaches to reducing climate change risks and enhancing resilience, the speakers noted.

Similarly, they observed, central and local government agencies could integrate this horizontally in all their agencies.

“Adaptation plans have to be long term,” said Nanduddu, “and integrating the adaptation strategies into national development plans is the main challenge here.”

“What we are trying to do here,” Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development, told IPS, “is to narrow the gaps between the top-down approach of national governments and the bottom-up approach of communities and civil society.”

Highlighting another aspect, Tianna Scozzaro of the Washington-based research and advocacy group Population Action International said, “We are looking at what the impact of migration and urbanisation due to climate change means to urban communities and hence, in a broader sense, looking at population growth and women’s empowerment.

“We want to mobilise resources to meet the unmet needs of women’s reproductive health and how they can adapt to change in such extreme weather,” she told IPS.