Poor are sidelined on climate change solutions
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
General Electric has rightly staked a claim to be an environmental leader by selling wind turbines. Wal-Mart is going green by asking its suppliers to evaluate their emissions as they manufacture Wal-Mart products. Trading in carbon emissions can certainly be profitable: In a month of dismal financial news in the
"We believe that technology can help solve some of these clean energy issues, and that ultimately by doing so we can make money for our investors," Jeff Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, told a conference in California this month.
But wind turbines, hybrid cars and carbon markets are solutions by and for the developed world. They ignore another huge piece of the climate change puzzle: how to best help the people in the developing world who are already feeling the effects of global warming.
"There is a trend to try to find solutions through technological interventions and high-investment solutions, which is tricky because that won't always work for poor countries," said Gonzalo Oviedo, author of a powerful report on the effect of climate change on poor people in the developing world, released this week by the International Union for the Conservation of Nature. "What we are saying is that in many poor countries there is a high level of vulnerability, and that needs other kinds of solutions."
The world is moving fast to figure out how to reduce emissions with the help of technology. It has done far less to help poor people adapt. The report, "Indigenous and Traditional Peoples and Climate Change," includes a kind of catalog of climate-related suffering already occurring among the poorest people of the earth.
In western
Among the Baka of Cameroon, rainfall has become less regular and harder to predict. "Women who normally catch fish in barriers built in small streams in the dry season are often unable to achieve traditional fish catches as flood patterns of the rivers are changing," the report says.
In Bangladesh, a rise in the sea of 1.5 meters, or 5 feet, would submerge 22,000 square kilometers of land, or 8,500 square miles, and displace 17 million desperately poor people, more than 15 percent of the population. Where are they going to go?
Here in
In much of the developing world, the response to climate change will require a bit of investment in low-tech ideas, not billions thrown into high technology,
"In making plans, decision makers should learn from indigenous people and their strategies - this is a new field of research and there are a number of good examples,"
Likewise, villages in
To be continue in other article...
(
Re-publish by Jacob Paradox from link (www.routers.com),(www.iht.com), (www.routers.com), (www.nytimes.com)
No comments:
Post a Comment