The year 2008 is halfway to the deadline for reaching the Millennium Development Goals. Despite some progress, they will not be achieved if current trends continue. Aid promises are predicted to be missed by $30bn, at a potential cost of 5 million lives. Starting with the G8 meeting in Japan, rich countries must use a series of high-profile summits in 2008 to make sure the Goals are met, and to tackle both climate change and the current food crisis. Economic woes must not be used as excuses: rich countries' credibility is on the line.
Topic:
Agriculture, Climate Change, International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, and Poverty
The current biofuel policies of rich countries are neither a solution to the climate crisis nor the oil crisis, and instead are contributing to a third: the food crisis. In poor countries, biofuels may offer some genuine development opportunities, but the potential economic, social, and environmental costs are severe, and decision makers should proceed with caution.
Topic:
Agriculture, Climate Change, Energy Policy, and Oil
In every society, women and men have different roles inside and outside the household, and different resources to deliver them. In the rural communities of developing countries where Oxfam works, men's roles typically focus on earning cash, by growing food, trading, or selling their labour. But it is largely the role of women to provide the food, fuel, water, and care that the family needs (all for no pay), in addition to earning some cash. In such communities, women are likely to have: greater reliance on natural resources – like rivers, wells, reliable rainfall, and forests fewer physical resources – such as land, fertilizer or irrigation, and fewer assets (like machinery, or a bicycle) to use to make money, or to sell as a last resort fewer financial resources – little cash, savings or access to credit, and less access to markets that give a good price for their goods less powerful social resources – due to social and cultural norms that limit their mobility and their voice in decision-making, reinforce traditional roles, and put them at risk of violence fewer human resources – due to having less education, fewer opportunities for training, and less access to official information.
Topic:
Climate Change, Gender Issues, and Non-Governmental Organization
People in Uganda, whose contribution to global warming has been minuscule, are feeling the impacts of climate change first and worst. On the one hand there is more erratic rainfall in the March to June rainy season, bringing drought and reductions in crop yields and plant varieties; on the other hand, the rainfall, especially in the later rains towards the end of the year, is reported as coming in downpours that are more intense and destructive, bringing floods, landslides, and soil erosion. Climate scientists say that, in the future, one of the most likely effects of climate change will be more rain, especially during the second rains from October to December.
Climate change is having a destructive impact on many groups around the world. Pastoralists in East Africa have been adapting to climate variability for millennia and their adaptability ought to enable them to cope with this growing challenge. This paper explains the policies required to enable sustainable and productive pastoralist communities to cope with the impact of climate change and generate sustainable livelihoods.
The Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College
Abstract:
On March 29-31, 2007, the Strategic Studies Institute and the Triangle Institute for Security Studies conducted a colloquium on “Global Climate Change: National Security Implications.” Other supporting organizations included the Army Environmental Policy Institute, The Center for Global Change (Duke University), Creative Associates, The Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions (Duke University), The Environmental Change and Security Program (The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars), and the Department of Environmental Sciences at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Topic:
International Relations, Climate Change, and Globalization
The Atlantic Council of the United States and the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations organized the first "U.S.-China Energy Security Cooperation Dialogue," held in Beijing on 31 October-1 November 2006. Conference participants included foreign policy analysts and energy experts from the U.S. and Chinese governments, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and universities in both the United States and China. The agenda covered a broad spectrum of energy and energy-related geopolitical issues, including long-range forecasts for energy supply and demand, energy sources ranging from oil and gas to coal, nuclear and renewables.
Topic:
Climate Change, Energy Policy, and International Cooperation
The human drama of climate change will largely be played out in Asia, where over 60 per cent of the world's population, around four billion people, live. Over half of those live near the coast, making them directly vulnerable to sea-level rise. Disruption to the region's water cycle caused by climate change also threatens the security and productivity of the food systems upon which they depend. In acknowledgement, both of the key meetings in 2007 and 2008 to secure a global climate agreement will be in Asia.
Climatic disasters are on the increase as the Earth warms up – in line with scientific observations and computer simulations that model future climate. 2007 has been a year of climatic crises, especially floods, often of an unprecedented nature. They included Africa's worst floods in three decades, unprecedented flooding in Mexico, massive floods in South Asia and heat waves and forest fires in Europe, Australia, and California. By mid November the United Nations had launched 15 'flash appeals', the greatest ever number in one year. All but one were in response to climatic disasters.
Oxfam estimates that adapting to climate change in developing countries is likely to cost at least $50bn each year, and far more if global greenhouse-gas emissions are not cut fast enough. Yet international funding efforts to date have been woeful. In the year that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued its direst warnings to date of the impacts of climate change on vulnerable developing countries, the rich and high-polluting countries increased their contribution to the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) for urgent adaptation needs by a mere $43m. This brings the total pledged to $163m – less than half of what the UK is investing in cooling the London Underground. Worse, only $67m has actually been delivered to the Fund – that's less than what people in the USA spend on suntan lotion in one month.
There is a basis for moving forward on negotiations to achieve emissions cuts… The 'Bali roadmap' process has been launched, aiming for a long term agreement on emissions cuts, including commitments by the US Future actions by developing countries to reduce emissions are to be supported by scaling up finance, technology and capacity-building from rich nations Negotiations on further emissions cuts beyond 2012 have been launched under the Kyoto Protocol, for completion by end 2009, with a guideline for reductions of 25-40% by 2020 (from a 1990 base) Australia is now included in the Kyoto Protocol, leaving the US as the only major developed country outside these negotiations.
There is a deep injustice in the impacts of climate change. Rich countries have caused the problem with many decades of greenhouse-gas emissions (and in the process have grown riche r). But poor countries will be worst affected, facing greater droughts, floods, hunger, and disease.
Topic:
Climate Change, Environment, and International Cooperation
Today, the observed impacts of global warming are becoming increasingly and rapidly obvious. They take the form of changing seasons, abnormal weather, heat waves, droughts, floods, marked changes in the behaviour of animals and plants. The world's poorest people living in places where the climate is already at its most extreme – such as the Inuit in the Arctic, pastoralist people in northern Kenya and across the Sahel, indigenous people and settlers in the Western Amazon – are already feeling serious impacts upon their lives and livelihoods. These are the communities least responsible for greenhouse gas emissions and who, because of poverty, isolation and political marginalisation, are too often those least equipped to adapt. This is all happening when global average temperatures have not yet exceeded 1°C. Whilst not all of these changes can yet be rigorously attributed to human-induced climate change, they are consistent with what is expected and compel us to take them as warning signs of the first order.
This briefing paper explores the difference between the EU and US-Australian positions on global climate policy in the wake of the 2007 Heiligendamm G8 summit and the UN High Level Event on climate change. It notes that although the two have very different analyses of the urgency of responding to climate change, they still concur on two of the most fundamental issues in post-Kyoto policy on climate change mitigation: neither side is arguing for a quantified ceiling on CO2 levels in the atmosphere, and neither is arguing for developing countries to take on quantified targets.
Topic:
International Relations, Climate Change, International Cooperation, and Treaties and Agreements