This is a science and nature show and we’ve spent nearly 20
weeks looking at the science around climate change, but the dirty secret about
climate change is that it is ultimately a social problem. And it’s a problem
that doesn’t affect us all equally. Climate change has become as much a social
justice issue as it is an issue for scientific research. We’ve said before on
this program that life isn’t fair; we all have to die, and suffering is
universal. Is it fair to the frog that the snake has to eat?
I don’t know the answer to that question but I do know this:
Climate change isn’t fair, and here’s why. The people it will impact the most
are the poorest people on earth. The people with the least ability to change
their circumstances, and in many cases, the people least responsible for the
mechanics of changing the climate in the first place. The Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change is unequivocal: we suffer from “uneven risk distribution”,
which is a fancy way of saying that wealthy nations will be able to insulate
their citizens, for a time at least, against some of the extreme weather
events, food shortages and security threats that climate change poses, poor
nations will not. The intersection of uneven economic development and climate
change exposure makes the world’s poor vulnerable to changing conditions in a
way that most of us in the industrial world are not. And while we are all at
eventual risk of social unrest and even violence if conditions get desperate
enough, we already see the unrest and violence that has occurred in regions and
nations that are environmentally on the brink.
In the near term, extreme weather events are the way in
which most of us will experience climate change directly, in the form of more
intense storms, colossally heavy rain fall, coastal flooding and heat waves
that exacerbate drought and wild fire conditions. Droughts and floods, too much
water coupled with not enough, these are what is on the agenda. Those two
problems alone set in motion a cascade of human impacts; decreases in crop
production and increases in food insecurity, decreasing freshwater resources
for agriculture, industry and direct human consumption, and flooding in coastal
zones and marginal recently urbanized land. These problems then compound
themselves, as subsistence agriculture becomes more and more difficult in
drought prone regions, human populations migrate increasingly to urban areas,
colonizing marginal territory on the outskirts of cities, territory with little
to no services. These people, driven from their homes by the inability to grow
their own food and provide for their families and communities, then confront
the other faces of climate change, namely the food insecurity that comes from
rising food prices due to decreases in crop productivity, and the domestic
insecurity that comes from moving into a rapidly expanding urban shanty town on
marginal swampy land or steep hillside. Extreme precipitation events, monsoon
rains, and typhoon storms easily flood these areas.
And we haven’t even considered sea level rise in this
scenario. As the sea encroaches into coastal human landscapes the consequences
are clear. Some low lying areas will be swamped all together, like the Pacific
island nations or the Ganges River delta in Bangladesh, home to millions. Sea
level rise is an existential threat to the people who live there. Large storm
systems cause storm surges to threaten otherwise stable coastlines; low
pressure and high winds, when coinciding with high tides can cause the ocean to
rise much higher than its normal high water mark, as the people of the
Philippines, New Orleans, lower Manhattan now know. And as freshwater aquifers are
rapidly depleted and sea levels continue to rise, in coastal areas seawater
seeps into these aquifers, filling the void created as freshwater is drawn out.
Wealthy communities can for a time afford to purchase fresh water, poor
communities cannot. Humans can survive only a matter of days with out fresh
water, and salt water intrusion joins food insecurity and social unrest as yet
another driver of human displacement and suffering with significant ties to
climate change.
For most listeners of this show, the near future impacts of
climate change may be uncomfortable, or economically challenging, but are
unlikely to destroy our communities or fundamental way of life. The same cannot
be said for the world’s truly poor. As the conversation around climate change
pivots increasingly away from mitigation towards adaptation, we need to keep
this in mind: it is in our local communities that we focus on adaptation, but
it is for the global community that we must continue efforts to mitigate
climate impact. We’ll look at how we do that in the coming weeks.
References:
I don’t always agree with the World Bank, but they released
a big report on this issue a couple of years ago: http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2013/06/19/what-climate-change-means-africa-asia-coastal-poor
