It's official: The world's poorest people will be the most screwed over by climate change and its ill effects, including drought, agricultural failures, water shortages, disease, flooding, and all the rest, according to a new report from the United Nations Development Program. "For millions of people, these are events that offer a one-way ticket to poverty and long-run cycles of disadvantage," the report says. The report cautions that inequalities in the ability to cope with climate change have been emerging as an increasingly powerful driver of even wider inequalities between and within countries. And while the poor will undoubtedly get shafted by other economic and social factors, it's not yet too late to mitigate the worst effects of climate change. UNDP has called for all developed nations to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by at least 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050, and for developing nations to cut their emissions 20 percent by 2050. (In the meantime, a little economic justice wouldn't hurt either.) "Ultimately, climate change is a threat to humanity as a whole. But it is the poor, a constituency with no responsibility for the ecological debt we are running up, who face the immediate and most severe human costs," said UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervis.
The Destitution Will Not Be Televised ... But There Is This Report
World’s poor to be shafted most by climate change, U.N. report says 2
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Posted 7:59 AM on 27 Nov 2007
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jbosborn Posted 3:35 am
27 Nov 2007
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MCollins Posted 5:02 am
27 Nov 2007
But I'm afraid that our approach to climate change will ultimately be determined by economics rather than by morality. I think a best-case scenario is one in which we recognize that it is in the best interests of the continued stability of our governments, our societies, our currencies, and our environment to achieve greater wealth distribution along with shared ownership of the issues of climate change. In effect, everyone needs to have their basic needs met: in a sort of global Hierarchy of Needs, we can't turn our attention to idealism or the abstract--which climate change is for most everyone, despite its physical reality--until we can feed, house, clothe, protect and educate ourselves and our children. Is it safe to call this the economics of true humanitarianism?
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