Shifting seasons are destroying harvests and causing widespread hunger–but this is just one of the multiple climate change impacts taking their toll on the world’s poorest people–according to a new report released today by Oxfam.
The report "Suffering the Science–Climate Change, People and Poverty." is being published ahead of the G8 Summit in Italy, where climate change and food security are high on the agenda. It combines the latest scientific observations on climate change, and evidence from the communities Oxfam works with in almost 100 countries around the world, to reveal how the burden of climate change is already hitting poor people hard.
The report warns that without immediate action 50 years of development gains in poor countries will be permanently lost. It says that climate-related hunger could be the defining human tragedy of this century.
Suffering the Science outlines evidence of how climate change is affecting every issue linked to poverty and development today including hunger, agriculture, health, labor, water, disasters and displacement.
New research based on interviews with farmers in fifteen countries across the world reveals how once distinct seasons are shifting and rains are disappearing. Farmers from Bangladesh to Uganda and Nicaragua, no longer able to rely on generations of farming experience, are facing failed harvest after failed harvest.
Rice and maize, two of the world’s most important crops on which hundreds of millions depend, particularly in Asia, the Americas and Africa, face significant drops in yields even under mild climate change scenarios, according to the report. Maize yields are forecast to drop by 15% or more by 2020 in much of sub-Saharan Africa and in most of India. One estimate puts the loss to Africa at $2 billion a year.
Water supplies are becoming so acutely challenged that several major cities including Kathmandu and La Paz which are dependent on the Himalayan and Andes glaciers may soon be unable to function.
"Climate change is the central poverty issue of our times,” said Jeremy Hobbs, Oxfam International Executive Director. “Climate change is happening today and the world’s poorest people, who already face a daily struggle to survive, are being hit hardest. The evidence is right in front of our eyes. The human cost of climate change is as real as any redundancy or repossession notice.”
A survey of top climate scientists, also published by Oxfam today, said poor people living in low-lying coastal areas, island atolls and mega deltas and farmers are most at risk from climate change because of flooding and prolonged drought. The scientists, all contributors to the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), named South Asia and Africa as climate change hotspots.
Many scientists are now sceptical that the world can limit global warming to 2°C because they do not believe that politicians are willing to agree the necessary cuts in carbon emissions, the report says. Two degrees is considered to be “economically acceptable” to rich countries however it would still mean a devastating future for 660 million people.
Oxfam is calling for G8 leaders to take personal responsibility for delivering a fair and adequate global deal to tackle climate change as only political commitment at the highest level can prevent a human catastrophe. Rich industrialized countries, which created the climate crisis and have the resources to tackle it, must cut their emissions by at least 40 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020 and mobilize $150 billion per year to fund emissions reduction and adaptation in the developing world, Oxfam said.
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