For all of our global leaders’ struggles in reaching quantifiable benchmarks towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions, at the very least we can find encouragement in the establishment of an ongoing discussion to work towards greenhouse-gas emissions mandates. As evidenced in the recent Gleneagles Dialogue as well as the Asia-Pacific Economic Conference meetings, significant time and energy are being devoted towards understanding climate change and its solidifying scientific consensus than the initial Kyoto talks a decade ago.
While our current world leaders concentrate on the next chapter of countervailing global climate change and focus on a new framework to replace the Kyoto Agreement set to expire in 2012, however, they would also do well by focusing not only on the instruments of destruction but also the very people that their instruments are already affecting.
Where it is true that the United States and Western Europe account for over 66 percent of the world’s CO2 emissions while African states account for less than 3 percent, it is these relatively poor nations that must bear the physical brunt of the burden of climate change. Let’s call this the inverse climate change law: The populations that contribute least to the epidemic of global warming are also those most vulnerable to its adverse effects.
Part of this reason is because of the immense wealth possessed by powerful, first-world countries, insulating them from immediate impact despite their status as the world’s biggest culprits. For instance, diminishing fresh water supplies are offset by expensive desalination plants; rising sea levels are compensated by flood barriers; and government agencies are able to introduce incentives and investment towards the growth of new crops more suitable to warmer climates and changing soil types. Another significant reason stems from the fact that most of the developing world already lies in geographic locations greatly at risk to extreme weather such as heat waves and floods that climate change exacerbates even more. As temperatures rise and river deltas flood even more drastically, adverse affects can lead to mass population migration, depleting fish stocks and crop failure. Research recently presented at the British Association’s Festival of Science warns that an extra 50 million people will be at risk of hunger by 2050 due to climate change projections, with the vast majority of these individuals in Africa. Furthermore, recent studies published in the journal Nature indicate correlations between climate change and incidences of malaria and dengue fever, with the former disease already claiming the life of one African child every 30 seconds.
Clearly, such drastic consequences beckon for the expansion of the call to action in preventing mass global warming to include protecting the inalienable rights and dignity of man already threatened. To choose inaction is to choose the subjection of millions of impoverished people to a gradual form of human degradation and torment for which we are indirectly responsible, effectively reducing any chances of upward economic and social mobility for the extreme poor.
Individuals often doubt whether environmental rights fall within the scope of human rights. Some argue that intergenerational justice between the living and those not yet existing is impossible to anticipate, while some going so far as to think of the entire subject of environmental rights as illogical. Yet in the framework of global climate change, our collective contributions to global change truly have an immediate and physical impact on our environment, with an increasingly interdependent world constituting a more acute awareness of our interdependent rights.
In this context, a Gleneagles Dialogue with mostly industrialized nations concentrating on sources of greenhouse gas emissions is not enough. To reach an effective agreement on proper action requires a conversation with the developing world as well to determine how to involve these countries in the climate-change agenda. We must not only target practices in our own countries to reform, but must also identify the translational effects of these practices in other countries, creating economic and public health mechanisms to increase preparedness for and allow for adaptation to climate change.
Current funding allocated towards achieving these interventions from the Kyoto Protocol total just $40 million a year — a miniscule sum insufficient to make inroads on such an all encompassing force. In negotiating the next Kyoto Treaty, increased funding must be an important topic of allocation. Meanwhile, organizations such as the Global Environmental Facility Fund and allocations directly from G8 nations and mega non-governmental organizations (read: Google.org and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation) can develop the institutions and measures desperately needed to protect the sanctity of those in greatest peril.
Thankfully the immediate physical threats presented by climate change are largely avoidable through the implementation of engineering and public health initiatives with long track records of efficacy and value. For example, foreign banks have applied their resources in the past towards providing insurance (financial protection) in cases of extreme drought, the distribution of insecticide treated bed nets has proven to drastically reduce incidences of malaria, and organizations such as the World Health Organization and CARE have decades of experience in public health preparedness for global epidemics. As we continue to examine the broad implications of climate change, we must keep in mind that in order to achieve climate equity, we must strive towards human equity.