NUSA DUA, INDONESIA: International bodies and governments must immediately establish effective mechanisms and create infrastructure to help the world’s poor cope with the climate change shocks that will devastate their lives, a food security expert said.
“The climate change is real and is posing great threats for the availability of food around the world,” said Menghestab Haile, Food Security Early Warning Advisor of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP).
He was speaking at a side event of the United Nations Frameworks of Convention for Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC) at the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Nusa Dua, Bali.
“WFP is presently fighting the hunger and destitution brought about by floods, droughts and other extreme events spurred by climate change,” he added.
With estimated temperature increases of between 2 and 3 C, climate change will bring with it more intense tropical storms as sea temperatures also rise, long droughts and other extreme climatic conditions in every corner of the world, especially in African, Asian and Latin American countries.
“Climate change threatens agriculture both in developed and developing countries. It has dramatic multiplier effects,” Haile added.
Climate shocks such as drought and flood can cause grave setbacks in nutritional status as food availability declines, prices rise and employment opportunities shrink.
Agricultural production and employment underpin many national economies. The agricultural sector accounts for over one-third of export earnings in around 50 developing countries, including Indonesia, and for almost half of employment in the developing world.
According to UNDP’s report, agricultural potential could increase by eight percent in developed countries, primarily as a result of longer growing seasons, while in the developing world it could fall by nine per cent by 2080.
With three-quarters of the world’s poor dependent on agricultural production, this has important implications for global poverty reduction efforts.
Emerging patterns of climate change risk in agriculture will have important implications for human development. Around three of four people in the world living on less than US$1 a day reside in rural areas. The same constituency also accounts for more than 800 million people in the world who are malnourished.
National projections for climate change in many regions in the world confirm potentially large-scale economic losses and damage to livelihoods.
In Indonesia, climate models simulating the impact of temperature changes, soil moisture content and rainfall on agricultural productivity show a wide dispersion of results, with yields falling by four per cent for rice and 50 per cent for maize. Losses will be especially marked in coastal areas where agriculture is vulnerable to salt water incursion.
“While the risks of climate change affect almost all societies, the poor households with their limited risk management capacity will, however, suffer the most,” Haile confirmed.
The inability of poor households to cope with climate shocks is reflected in the immediate human impacts, and increasing poverty.
Climate change will lower the incomes and reduce the opportunities for poverty reduction. By 2080, the number of additional people at risk of hunger could reach 600 million.
Deteriorating nutrition and falling incomes generate a twin threat: increased vulnerability to illness and fewer resources for medical treatment. Drought and floods are often catalysts for wide-ranging health problems, including increases in diarrhea among children, cholera, various skin-related problem and acute under-nutrition.
WFP has been active in implementing a number of approaches including humanitarian response mechanisms, assessment, vulnerability analysis and mapping.
“We have been carrying out analysis and mapping as well as comprehensive food security and vulnerability analysis in 80 countries,” he said.
WFP is now developing an Insurance Scheme for the poor as hunger safety nets for livelihood protection.
“Climate shocks can have devastating consequences for household assets and savings,” said Haile.
Assets such as live animals represent something more than a safety net for coping with climate shocks. They provide people with a productive resource, nutrition, collateral for credit, and a source of income to meet health and education costs, while also providing security in the event of crop failures. Their loss increases future vulnerability. (By RITA A WIDIADANA/ The Jakarta Post/ ANN)
At Bali conference, climate change victims say aid falls short
Victims of climate change, real and potential, appealed Tuesday for a vast increase in international aid to protect them from and compensate them for rising seas, crop-killing drought and other likely impacts of global warming.
"We cannot wait. We need to do something now," said climatologist Rizaldi Boer of Indonesia, some of whose farmers are already suffering from unusual dry spells blamed on climate change.
The "Adaptation Fund," being developed under U.N. climate agreements to enable poorer countries to adjust to a warmer world, has thus far drawn a mere $67 million for a task the World Bank estimates will cost tens of billions of dollars a year.
The almost 190 nations assembled here for the annual U.N. climate conference are taking up the fund's future among other issues on an agenda aimed chiefly at launching a two-year negotiating process to seal a deal to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
That 175-nation accord requires 36 industrial nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a key source of global warming, by an average 5% below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States is the only industrial nation that has rejected Kyoto.
The European Union and others are seeking a post-Kyoto agreement that would mandate much deeper reductions by industrial nations — including, they hope, the U.S. — in carbon dioxide and other such emissions from power plants, factories, vehicles and other sources.
Many here also want to see China and other major emerging economies take steps to curtail the increase in their emissions. The two weeks of talks promise to be difficult, with success far from guaranteed.
Operation, control and funding of the Adaptation Fund has been debated for years at these meetings of U.N. climate treaty parties.
The U.N. climate chief, Yvo de Boer, told reporters Tuesday he hoped it was possible that this meeting would finally make the fund operational, "so that perhaps in as little as a year before real resources for adaptation can begin to flow to developing countries."
The fund is expected to finance climate-change projects ranging from sea walls to guard against expanding oceans, to improved water supplies for drought areas, to training in new agricultural techniques.
All acknowledge, however, that the available money is relatively paltry.
The fund is financed by a 2-percent levy on revenues generated by the Clean Development Mechanism, the program whereby industrial nations pay for "carbon credits" produced by emissions-reduction projects in the developing world — credits then counted against reduction targets at home.
Those levies thus far are "tiny compared to the need," said Kate Raworth, a senior research with the Oxfam International aid group.
Oxfam and other advocacy groups favor a broadening of Adaptation Fund revenue sources, perhaps to include aviation taxes or direct taxes on all fossil-fuel use.
"The money should come from the countries most responsible and most capable," Raworth said, listing the United States, the European Union, Japan, Australia and Canada.
An Oxfam news conference was joined by a representative of the people of Papua New Guinea's Carteret Islands, in the far western Pacific, believed to be among the world's first "climate refugees."
As seas expand from warming and from the runoff of melting land ice, higher and higher tides are eating away at tiny places like the Carterets, a sandy atoll of a half-dozen islands.
Its 3,000 people, no longer able to grow taro, their staple crop, are preparing to abandon the islands over the next several years, resettling on designated land on nearby Bougainville island.
The islanders have a relocation appropriation of 2 million kina in local currency ($800,000), but to move 600 families that "doesn't go a long way," said their representative, Ursula Rakova.
"We still need more money, from people like America," she said.
Sinking islands deride climate change inaction
As the world tries to hammer out a future plan to tackle climate change, tiny islands say it is too late -- their homes and histories are disappearing under the rising sea.
Dressed in traditional grass and rattan skirts, the islanders used music, song and slide shows to tell their story to a tearful audience in a luxury hotel on the Indonesian island of Bali.
For nations and communities that sit only a few metres above sea level, even small ocean rises engulf their land and send destructive salty water into their food supply, leaving residents with little choice but to flee.
"Relocation for us is our only means of building our future. We will lose our identity, but we have no choice, the islands are shrinking," said Ursula Rakova, from the low-lying Carteret Islands in Papua New Guinea.
"Do we leave our children so they float in the sea, or do we help them now?"
Climate experts say that as global warming heats the Earth up, glaciers and polar ice caps will melt and sea waters will expand, sending oceans rising by at least 18 centimetres (7.2 inches) by 2100.
World sea levels rose 3.1 millimetres (0.12 inch) per year from 1993 to 2003, the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said.
Representatives from the Carteret Islands, the Pacific nation of Kiribati, and islands in Australia's Torres Strait have brought their story to a UN climate conference being held here in Bali.
"For us as Kiribati people, the land is very important," said Tangaroa Arobati, a global warming activist from Kiribati, where about 92,500 people live on 33 coral atolls which sit about two or three metres above sea level.
"A very important thing is to have land and women. It gives us our future generation, and our land, this is our heritage."
As sea levels have crept higher, the coasts have eroded, corals have been bleached, and islanders' staple foods such as the giant Babai taro, coconut and banana are unable to grow in salty soil.
Drinking water is being contaminated with sea water, while extreme weather events beat coastlines, and fish are no longer abundant.
On the Carterets, where one island has been split in two by the encroaching sea, Rakova said hunger and desperation were sending the young men to mainland Papua New Guinea, or spiralling into depression.
"The young men of Carteret relieve their pain by getting drunk," she said.
Nearly 190 nations have gathered at the UN Bali meeting, which aims to see nations agree to negotiate a new regime to combat climate change when the current phase of Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012.
But activists say new targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would do little to held some Pacific islanders.
"They talk about climate change as if it is something that might happen in the distant future, something that might happen in 2020 or 2050 or even in 2100," said Tony Mohr, of the Australian Conservation Foundation.
"However vibrant cultures and communities of the Pacific are already experiencing climate change."
Islanders are urging the world to do all it can to reduce greenhouse gases and stop history repeating itself on other small islands.
They also want financial help from rich nations and practical assistance for the islanders, who will likely soon join a growing number of climate refugees.
"If this continues, maybe we will be left with three coconuts. We may be clinging to a very small piece of land. Where is our future?" said Kiribati's Arobati.
News and politics
climate change
global warming
No comments:
Post a Comment