West must create right climate to help world's poorest people

Published on Monday 8 December 2008 21:08

LEXI BARNETT and RICARDO NAVARRO, Create a Climate for Justice campaign

AN ESTIMATED 150,000 people die every year from diseases that are attributable to climate change. In 2000-4, 262 million people were affected by climate disasters annually – and 98 per cent of these were in the developing world.

This week, a coalition representing more than 170 Catholic development charities – including Scotland's leading international aid agency, the Scottish Catholic International Aid Fund (Sciaf) – is joining bishops from around the world to highlight the plight of the world's poor, at the United Nations' talks in Poland to agree a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol on climate change.

They are gathering at the site of the UN Framework Climate Change Convention negotiations in Poznan to launch a worldwide campaign calling for government leaders to take urgent action to help developing countries cope.

The current negotiations will start the process of developing a post-Kyoto Protocol treaty, to be agreed next December in Copenhagen, which will set out a new global framework for tackling climate change.

Sciaf works in more than 20 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America to provide emergency and development aid, as well as campaigning for trade justice, debt relief, more and better aid, and (more recently) to address climate change.

While wealthy countries have consumed vast amounts of energy to power their economies, it is people living in poverty in developing countries who are suffering the consequences. Changing rainfall patterns, storms and droughts are drastically increasing the challenges faced by people already struggling to escape extreme poverty.

Through our work in the world's poorest countries, we know that demand for relief efforts and emergency food supplies has grown rapidly over recent years.

We have a moral obligation to make sure developing countries receive the economic and technical assistance they need to adapt to the challenges being brought on by climate change. The new treaty has to ensure that we do this.

We really need a strategic survival plan, as that is what is at stake here: our survival.

This notion of "people who are going to be affected" is a little ironic, as, of course, all of us are going to be affected. But at least let us start with the people who are already being affected.

There is an injustice between North and South, between those who consume the most energy and those who suffer the effects through climate change. We need to take that message to the United States and Europe.

The new campaign, Create a Climate for Justice, is spearheaded by Caritas and CIDSE, two alliances of Catholic aid agencies.

Caritas Internationalis is a coalition of 173 Catholic international aid and development organisations. CIDSE is an alliance of 16 Catholic development organisations from Europe and North America.

The new campaign will bring together hundreds of thousands of people to call on their governments to negotiate a socially just, post-2012 climate agreement which addresses the impact of climate change on developing countries.

The Create a Climate for Justice calls for industrialised countries to:

&149 Recognise and support the right to sustainable development of people in developing countries;

&149 Provide sufficient and secure funding and technical support for developing countries to help them adapt to the impacts of climate change;

&#149 Commit to at least a 30 per cent to 40 per cent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by the world's industrialised countries by 2020.

&#149 Sciaf was set up in 1965 to support poor people regardless of race or religion. Lexi Barnett is its campaigns officer. Dr Ricardo Navarro heads a Sciaf partner organisation in El Salvador, which is helping communities adapt to climate change.