Climate change: the untold story

Posted by bex — 13 September 2006 at 8:00am - Comments

A UN jeep driving through flood water

It has facts, it has suspense, it even has Futurama clips: Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth launches in the UK today, bringing with it mind-blowing descriptions of the destruction facing earth unless we pull our acts together in the next 10 years.

While Gore's been exploding the myths about global warming in North America, a coalition of environmental and development organisations including Greenpeace have been out and about in Latin America and the Caribbean, looking at the impacts that climate change is having there.

One of the most distressing facts about climate chaos is that it's felt hardest by the world's poorest and most vulnerable people - the people who have done the least to contribute to it and who are least able to cope with its impacts. Theirs is the untold story of climate change; while Katrina, rightly, took up days of airtime, the devastating impact that extreme weather has on places like Latin America has generally been ignored.

The coalition's report - Up in Smoke? Latin America and the Caribbean - shows that, while the region has always suffered from some extreme weather, the largely predictable temperature and rainfall patterns are becoming less predictable and often more extreme. There's been drought in the Amazon, flooding in Haiti, vanishing glaciers in Colombia, extreme cold in the Andes and hurricanes in Central America... The list goes on.

Not only do people living there have to cope with the direct effects of extreme weather, they are also dealing with the knock-on effects like water shortages, crop failure and disease.

And it's getting worse; not only will agriculture, fisheries and water availability be affected, climate change will likely lead to an increase in chronic malnutrition and diseases like malaria and cholera.

Depressed yet? It's not all bad news. There is a growing consensus on the need for immediate and urgent action. And we already know what we need to do to reduce future climate change. What we lack, here in the UK as well as in the USA, is political will.

The UK is crucial to the future of Latin American and Caribbean people. The whole Latin American region has contributed less than four per cent of total energy-related global emissions of greenhouse gases; the majority has come from wealthy countries. And it's the wealthy countries that now need to take responsibility for their actions and reduce their emissions.

"It's about an ethical commitment that can be put off no longer" - Juan Mayr

There is still time to prevent climate change from entering its "feedback loop" of catastrophic destruction, and most scientists agree that we have around 10 years to do it. That means it's down to us - and there is plenty you can do.


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