The Climate Crisis Is Not A Future Problem
We’re pleased to have Dave Thomas writing on this week’s blog. Dave works as Church and Community Manager for Christian Aid Ireland, WDR’s sister agency.
Together, we’re calling on Irish Methodists to sign the Loss and Damage Petition. Dave explains more…
The climate crisis is not a future problem, it is here and now, devastating the lives of billions of people and destroying livelihoods. From droughts in East Africa to unprecedented heatwaves across India and Pakistan, many poor communities who are facing the impacts of climate change lack the capacity to cope.
Floods in Pakistan
The world’s richest nations have contributed the most to the climate crisis and yet it is the world’s poorest and the most marginalised, including women and girls, who are bearing the brunt and enduring its harshest effects.
As detailed in Christian Aid’s Counting the Cost report, extreme weather events – like persistent droughts or Cyclone Idai, which hit Southern Africa in 2019 – cause untold damage and irreversible losses, wiping out homes, disrupting livelihoods, displacing people and cultures and requiring them to rebuild their lives, their homes and communities from scratch.
Climate change is amplifying the frequency, intensity, and duration of extreme weather events such as flooding, heatwaves, and cyclones and slow onset events such as sea-level rise, desertification, biodiversity loss, and melting glaciers. These effects cannot be avoided by simply adapting to climate change. This is what is defined in international climate negotiations as ‘loss and damage’. It is those irreversible and unavoidable consequences of the climate crisis that are beyond a countries capacity to adapt.
For example, countries can adapt to reduce the impact of extreme weather events by putting in place early warning systems or by building flood defence mechanisms, however, adaptation can only go so far. Even with the best emergency warning systems the increasingly intense hurricanes and typhoons are still destroying homes and displacing populations causing huge economic losses and humanitarian needs that must be met.
Christian Aid Ireland is campaigning, therefore, for the UK and Irish governments to support the creation of an International Fund for Loss and Damage.
The idea of an International Fund for Loss and Damage can be traced back over 30 years to 1991. As the governments of the world negotiated what would become the UN Framework convention on climate change (UNFCCC), Vanuatu on behalf of members of the Small Island States (AOSIS) proposed a financial mechanism to deal with the consequences of sea level rise. The idea was that low-lying island states like Vanuatu and others shouldn’t be left to cope with the financial burden of responding to sea-level rise alone since the impact would disproportionately fall upon low-lying and small island states and yet the responsibility for the causes of sea-level rise disproportionately lies with the most developed industrialised nations. The financial mechanism proposed in 1991 was never established, but the proposal began a dialogue and continuing calls for a loss and damage fund.
Christian Aid’s partner organisation, Centro Humboldt, describes what climate-related loss and damage means in Nicaragua:
“Corn is like a symbol of our culture and our food depends a lot on corn. We usually have two seasons for growing corn. Currently, with the prevailing patterns of precipitation, the first season has almost disappeared because the amount of rain has reduced to an amount that doesn’t allow small farmers to produce corn, beans, rice and other products. Last year (2021), the amount of crops, of this type grown was below 50% due to the lack of rain in the first period.”
Losses such as these in many countries will set back development gains, reinforce inequality across and within countries, and increase the vulnerability of those living in poverty.
The campaign for a Loss and Damage funding mechanism is a campaign for climate justice. It is calling for a shared global responsibility for the consequences of the climate crisis. Micah taught that God’s people were to be those who would, ‘act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with God’. There is no justice in the wealthy allowing the poorest and most vulnerable communities to pay the penalty in terms of loss and damage for a climate crisis that they did not cause.
“Act justly, love mercy and walk humbly with your God.”
The world’s richest economies who built their wealth almost exclusively on fossil fuels, must contribute their fair share to financing loss and damage. With the latest IPCC report projecting droughts will displace 700 million people in Africa, this is a matter of survival for climate vulnerable countries and communities.