Climate change is damaging people’s lives today. Even if world leaders agree the strictest possible curbs on greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the prospects are very bleak for hundreds of millions of people, most of them among the world’s poorest. This paper puts the dramatic stories of some of those people alongside the latest science on the impacts of climate change on humans. Together they explain why climate change is fundamentally a development crisis. The world must act immediately and decisively to address this, the greatest peril to humanity this century.
It is in the tropics where the bulk of humanity lives – many of them in poverty – that climate change is hitting now and hitting hardest. For the poor countries in the tropics and sub-tropics particularly, almost every observation and prediction about health, food security, water shortage, natural disasters, famine, drought, and conflict is worsening at an alarming rate.
We need to stop harming and start helping. In December 2009 the world’s politicians will meet in Copenhagen to sign a deal to tackle climate change. This deal must ensure that global carbon emissions peak by 2015, and then begin falling. Rich countries must commit to reduce their own emissions by at least 40 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020 and all countries must act to reduce global emissions by at least 80 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.
As importantly, beginning immediately, developing countries will need at least $150 billion a year to cope with the effects of climate change and to pursue their own low-carbon futures.
It is not only morally right, it is economically smart to adapt for climate change. The better developed a country, the better it copes with environmental disaster and recovers.****
