Life on the front line of climate change

Brie O´Keefe, campaign officer for Progressio, an international charity with Catholic roots that is based in London, says Asia stands to be greatly affected by climate change. She urges rich countries to act now to curb global carbon emissions and help poor countries adapt to climate change as a matter of urgency.

LONDON (UCAN) — World leaders, activists, civil servants, youth, women and faith leaders have descended on Copenhagen in their tens of thousands to take part in what British economist Lord Stern has called “the most important meeting since the Second World War.”

Brie O’Keefe

While governments scramble to take measures to curb global temperature rises recommended by scientists, the rest of the world is already coming to terms with the fact that climate change is already happening. And nowhere is this felt more strongly than in some parts of Asia.

At the most recent round of climate-change talks, held in November in Barcelona, Spain, Joseph Hadler from NGO Forum for Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation in Bangladesh spoke about what his country is already going through.

“I am here as a victim of climate change, my country is facing so many problems nowadays and those problems are very much because of climate change. Now all year round we are having cyclonic conditions,” Hadler said.

Though many in the media and beyond continue to debate the science behind climate change, the facts speak for themselves. Two major cyclones have hit Bangladesh in the last three years alone.

These raging storms devastated the infrastructure and people´s livelihood in many coastal areas of Bangladesh, Hadler explained.

Salt-water incursion is a common problem too. As seawater moves inland, it can often prevent productive agriculture.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body tasked with assessing the risks surrounding global warming, predicts that as more carbon is released into the atmosphere, extreme weather like cyclones will become more frequent and intense.

But what Hadler wants — along with so many NGOs attending the Copenhagen talks this week — is not simply a list of predictions about how bad things might get, but concrete action:

“I am here just to make the world aware that I am a victim, my country is a victim, of what we are facing and the reasons behind it. (World) leaders must think about all this and do something for victim countries like Bangladesh.”

As a continent, Asia stands to be greatly affected by climate change. In many countries where Progressio works, such as Timor Leste, where 80 percent of youths are unemployed and 40 percent of the population lives on less than a dollar a day, few resources are available to put towards projects that will protect them from the volatile environmental future that science is predicting.

A village in Bangladesh devastated by a cyclone (File photo)

Indeed, the issue of adaptation, how communities will be able to “adapt” to enable them to cope with the effects of climate change, highlights one of the major sticking points of all international climate negotiations held to date — historical responsibility.

It is a strange irony that those countries largely responsible for creating climate change will be the least affected by its consequences, leaving poor countries with negligible blame struggling to cope.

And yet, many governments from developed countries are resisting calls for extra money to be set aside to fund climate-change adaptation in the world´s poorest countries, preferring to use international aid to fight poverty while helping developing nations curb their carbon emissions.

Church leaders are lending their voices to the international call to begin caring for our planet in a sustainable way. During the UN summit on climate change held in September in New York, Pope Benedict XVI spoke in a video message of our responsibility to care for the earth.

“The natural environment is given by God to everyone, and so our use of it entails a personal responsibility towards humanity as a whole, particularly towards the poor and towards future generations,” he said.

“The economic and social costs of using up shared resources must be recognized with transparency and borne by those who incur them, and not by other peoples or future generations. The protection of the environment, and the safeguarding of resources and of the climate, oblige all leaders to act jointly, respecting the law and promoting solidarity with the weakest regions of the world.”

Despite many such calls, there are still a host of political stumbling blocks preventing quick action on climate change.

Copenhagen, say activists, is our best chance for a deal, but possibly not our last chance. Climate change is not going away any time soon, but the decisions made now will dictate how well we deal with it in years to come.

In Barcelona, Hadler spoke about entire Bangladeshi villages being uprooted and moved inland to avoid saltwater incursion.

“I want to caution world leaders,” he said. “We can´t dig graves in my village anymore because it is submerged in saline water, so we move bodies away to bury them. Is this our future?”

Unless rich countries act now to curb global emissions and help poor countries adapt as a matter of urgency, stories like Hadler´s will become all too common. That´s why Copenhagen must not fail.