Climate Change Q and A

Climate Change Q and A

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What impact does climate change have on the Millennium Development Goals?

According to the UN Development Program (UNDP), climate change presents significant threats to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which aim to halve poverty by 2015. The increasing frequency and severity of floods, droughts, and hurricanes threaten the very resources poor countries rely on. According to the UNDP, these events "are likely to place additional strains on poorer countries already facing serious challenges due to food insecurity, indebtedness, HIV/AIDS, environmental degradation, armed conflicts, economic shocks, and the effects of globalization."

Kofi Annan, former secretary general of the United Nations, put it this way in a November 8, 2006 submission to the Washington Post: "Efforts to prevent future emissions must not be allowed to obscure the need to adapt to climate change, which will be an enormous undertaking because of the massive carbon accumulations to date. The world's poorest countries, many of them in Africa, are least able to cope with this burden—which they had little role in creating—and will need international help if they are not to be further thwarted in their efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals ...The question is not whether climate change is happening but whether, in the face of this emergency, we ourselves can change fast enough."

How climate change threatens the MDGs:

Climate change is predicted to do the following:

• Degrade the forests, fish, pastures, and cropland that many poor families depend on for their food and their means of earning a living.
• Damage poor people’s homes, water supply, and health, which will undermine their ability to earn a living.
• Exacerbate social tensions over resource use, which can lead to conflict, destabilizing livelihoods and forcing communities to migrate

Climate change could undermine children’s ability to attend school.

• More children (especially girls) are likely to be taken out of school to help fetch water, care for ill relatives, or earn an income.
• Malnourishment and illness among children could reduce their school attendance and impair their learning when they are in class.
• Floods and hurricanes destroy school buildings and force migration.

Climate change is expected to exacerbate current gender inequalities.

• Women tend to depend more on the natural environment for their livelihoods than men do, so women are more vulnerable than men to its variability and change.
• Women and girls are typically the ones to fetch water, fodder, firewood, and often food. In times of climate stress, they must cope with fewer resources and a greater workload.
• Female-headed households with few assets are affected particularly severely by climate-related disasters.

Climate change will lead to more deaths and illness as a result of heat waves, floods, droughts, and hurricanes.

• It may increase the prevalence of diseases spread by mosquitoes (such as malaria and dengue fever) or spread in water (such as cholera and dysentery). Children and pregnant women are particularly vulnerable to these diseases.
• It is expected to reduce the quality and quantity of drinking water, as well as exacerbate malnutrition among children, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

Climate change will alter the quality and productivity of natural resources and ecosystems, some of which may be irreversibly damaged. These changes will also reduce biological diversity and compound existing environmental degradation.

Sources: Adapted from Sperling (2003) and Reid and Alam (2005), from Oxfam's "Adapting to climate change: What's needed in poor countries, and who should pay" (Oxford, UK: Oxfam International, 2007), Oxfam Briefing Paper.

What does it mean to “help poor people adapt”?

People have always adapted to natural variability in the climate. But human-induced climate change will create unprecedented climate stress for many of the world’s most vulnerable communities. It is making weather patterns less predictable and increasing the intensity and frequency of floods, droughts, hurricanes, and storms.

In order for communities to adapt to climate change, they must take early action to reduce their vulnerability and build their resilience to new and heightened risks. This sort of work could reduce the damaging impact that climatic shocks will have on their lives and their methods of earning a living. If they fail to adapt to the new reality of global warming before they face its full impacts, they will suffer far greater damage from natural disasters, and at much higher cost, both in human and financial terms.

Money is needed to help poor countries adapt. The governments of developed countries, such as the US, must help—as they bear the responsibility for much of the damage. This financing must be new and in addition to existing development aid commitments. It should be channeled through agencies and international institutions that have expertise in development and climate change. Funding should be delivered in a transparent and accountable way, with input and participation by local affected communities.

In addition, developing countries will need help in meeting their own energy needs as their economies grow. Through low-carbon-emitting green sources of energy and other green technologies, developing communities and countries can minimize their greenhouse gas emissions while meeting their future energy needs. The US economy and US workers can benefit when these green technologies are shared with developing countries.

What are some examples of adaptation efforts?

Efforts to cope with increased flooding: upgrading national flood early warning systems and raising community awareness, building new homes and schools on raised foundations, building high platforms for emergency flood shelter, integrating flood risks into governmental planning and budgeting processes, and creating a community-based action plan for responding to floods.

Efforts to cope with lower, more erratic rainfall: upgrading national meteorological systems and medium-term forecasts; researching, testing, and growing drought-tolerant crop varieties; installing efficient, low-cost irrigation systems; installing rainwater-harvesting systems; and spreading water-conserving farming practices.

Efforts to cope with more severe hurricanes: upgrading hurricane early warning systems and community awareness, planting a mangrove bioshield along the coast to diffuse storm waves, and changing building regulations to reinforce new infrastructure.

How exactly does a cap-and-trade system work?

Most of the bills currently being introduced in Congress, including America’s Climate Security Act, will establish a cap-and-trade system to reduce the emissions that cause global warming. Under a cap-and-trade system, a “cap,” or a limit on the total amount that countries can pollute, is established. Total emissions allowed under the cap are then divided into individual permits.

Because the cap restricts the amount of carbon that can be emitted, the permits take on a financial value. This is where trading comes in. Companies that do not have enough permits must either cut their emissions or buy spare permits from others. Companies that pollute more will require more permits and will have the option of buying them from cleaner sources and therefore paying the facilities that can reduce their emissions more cheaply. The effect is to decrease emissions at the lowest cost while allowing entities flexibility in meeting the cap.

How can a cap-and-trade system benefit poor people?

A big part of the debate regarding how to structure a cap-and-trade system is focused on how permits, or allowances, should be distributed to regulated entities. This can be facilitated by giving the allowances away to entities for free or administering an auction. A well-designed cap-and-trade system would sell allowances to polluters through an auction and make them pay for their pollution. Such auctions level the playing field, as dirtier and less efficient energy producers will have to purchase more allowances to have the right to pollute. The revenue from selling pollution allowances could then be invested in programs that support lower income households, help poor communities in developing countries adapt to the impacts of climate change, and fund clean energy technologies to help reduce global warming pollution and provide energy access to poor communities.

How is climate change an issue of security?

As populations increase in some of the world’s poorest countries, a harsher climate can lead to migration; refugee crises; and conflicts over scarce natural resources, including land and water. Long-term economic destabilization in developing countries can also further undermine stability and security.

In 2007, a panel of retired US generals and admirals released a report that highlights climate change as a serious national security threat to the US. The report outlines how “climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world,” and it calls on the US to help stabilize the climate at levels that will “avoid significant disruption to global security and stability.” The report also calls on the US to “commit to global partnerships that help developing countries build the capacity and resiliency to better manage climate impacts” to help avoid state and regional destabilization. Engaging in ongoing multilateral efforts to tackle adaptation will be one critical way for the US to ensure that climate change does not threaten global as well as US security.

Even if all developed countries reduce their emissions substantially, global greenhouse gas emissions will still be at levels you say could cause dangerous climate change because of emissions from developing countries. What should developing countries do to contribute to the solution? Should they take on binding emission reduction targets and other measures?

Developing countries are already taking strong actions to reduce their emissions—stronger in many ways than the US. Taken together, the efforts of China, India, and Brazil could in fact result in a greater reduction in emissions than what the European Union has pledged to do in the 2020 time frame. At the recent UN negotiations in Bali, developing countries took a large step forward by being willing to take measurable, reportable, and verifiable mitigation actions. They went further than they had in the past, recognizing that all countries will need to make appropriate contributions to the effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The US needs to take a leadership role in enabling developing countries to be a part of the solution, both by providing the technological and financial support that these countries need and by leading the way through the reduction of its own emissions.

Why should the US stop polluting if China and India won’t?

While some big developing countries have been increasingly producing greenhouse gas emissions, they are not among those countries most historically responsible for causing the climate change that has happened thus far. The US can and should play a global leadership role in addressing climate change.

Meanwhile, large developing countries such as China and India will have to play an important part in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions because of their size and rapidly rising emissions. Any global agreement should address the role played by those countries, but it must also account for the imbalance of wealth and resources between developing countries and rich ones. While countries like China and India may have high levels of total emissions, their emissions per person, or per capita emissions, are far less than those in the US. For example, per capita emissions in the US, Australia, and Canada are six times those of China and 13 times those of India.

Source: Climate Change Q and A. OxFam. 20 Aug 2008 <