If I’m an environmentalist, it’s primarily on the basis of human rights concerns, and the knowledge of the impacts that environmental destruction is having on the world’s poor (but needless to say, not all environmental destruction hurts the poor). Climate change is the most pressing example, and I find it hard to believe that anyone who claims to struggle with and for the poor and oppressed would oppose efforts to reduce it’s impacts.

Those who support the miners at the expense of aggressively confronting emmissions are advocating unmitigated climate change, and they must look the consequences in the eye, and say that they are prepared to accept them as a neccessary consequence of their support for the coal miners. These are people I know and respect, which is why their position disturbs me. A friend of mine remarked yesterday that his struggle is not with the right – his opposition is clear cut – but rather with the left, which stands in the way of truly fundamental change by arriving at conclusions that leave out the important strands (of race, gender, the natural environment, culture, technology, language – take your pick).

This isn’t empty rhetoric. The world’s poorest countries are the ones least able to to deal with the impacts of climate change, and many of these are among the most greatly affected.

The conflict in Sudan and other parts of the Sahel region of Africa, such as Chad, Ethiopia, and Somalia, is the result of a number of factors, and it would be simplistic in the extreme to say that the current situation is the result climate change. Yet the region has been facing a long term decrease in rainfall patterns that started in the 1970s, and has persisted and worsened. Rainfall is reported to have dropped by 40% in the last 50 years. The Sudanese conflicts started as nomadic pasturalists and agriculturalists came into conflict as less water resources were available – the land that had been used for grazing was no longer productive, and nomadic pasturalists had to compete with those who had been growing their crops in the same places for many decades, themselves suffering from decreased rainfall. The current Sudanese genocide is being worsened by the same dynamics.

This may be an extreme example, but it isn’t an isolated case. Water is a basic fundamental human right, and the food it supplies equally so. One sixth of the world’s population depends wholly or in part on glaciers for a reliable source of water. This includes much of China, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Peru, and other developing countries.  To quote from the most comprehensive survey on the impacts of glacier decrease:

With more than one-sixth of the Earth’s population relying on glaciers and seasonal snow packs for their water supply, the consequences of these hydrological changes for future water availability—predicted with high confidence and already diagnosed in some regions—are likely to be severe.

The article is worth reading in full. (Contact me if you can’t access the fulltext, and I’ll email you a copy)

And then there’s Bangladesh, another of the world’s poorest countries. Again, the causes of this poverty are manifold. The legacies of colonialism, partition, incorporation into Pakistan and then bloody seccesion, extreme flooding and tropical cyclones, corruption, ineffectual and negative aid, structural adjustment, and many other factors have all contributed to the current poverty. However, while we would like for it to be wealthier, poverty is a fact we must accept as real in the here and now. With unmitigated climate change, the situation is likely to be significantly worsened. I’ll let a Bangladeshi speak for herself – my curt summary would do injustice to her words…

Also worth reading are the reports ‘Up in Smoke‘, and ‘Africa: Up in Smoke‘, which were commissioned by a group of some the world’s leading poverty reduction and environmental organisations.

Much of the suffering in this world is the result of invisible violence; the consequences of words and actions that mean little or nothing to the perpetrator, but that have dramatic consequences for the affected. Maybe those who deprioritise climate change are ignorant of it’s consequences, but really they have no excuse.