After Mohammed Nasheed, President of the Maldives, warned that climate change and rising sea levels were affecting his nation so badly that it was a human rights crisis, the Guardian reports today that Oxfam is warning against severe food shortages as a result of crop failure.
In a bout of press coverage, several groups are warning that climate change and global warming are not issues to be tackled so that we can secure the peace of an abstract future; they are the very real cause of crises that could see, according to Oxfam, 350m more people in starvation, and according to President Nasheed, several islands in the Maldives – including whole communities – under water.
Oxfam have produced a report on the problem of crop failure, starvation amongst the world’s poor, and its link to climate change. The report, as quoted by The Guardian, states that,
“Climate change’s most savage impact on humanity in the near future is likely to be in the increase in hunger … the countries with existing problems in feeding their people are those most at risk from climate change. Millions of farmers will have to give up traditional crops as they experience changes in the seasons that they and their ancestors have depended on. Climate-related hunger [may become] the defining human tragedy of this century.”
With the next in a long chain of G8 summits set to begin tomorrow and last until Friday, an apparent disparity between the world’s richest and poorest countries, highlighted by the problems of climate change, is surfacing.
Indian diplomats have already argued that the world’s most developed nations – who, in industrialising earlier, have reaped the economic benefits and caused some of the largest problems for climate change – should be set a base year of 1990 on their carbon emissions reductions. Once again, then, it will be the world’s developed nations who might set in place the practices that will save the world’s poorest, and the problems surrounding climate change – which are still in essence abstract in the developed world – will come to a legislative head at Copenhagen in December.
The comments made by Oxfam and President Nasheed of the Maldives should not go unheard.
