For all the terrifying forecasts, we cannot yet be certain about what the full impacts of climate change will be.
And though we are all vulnerable, people in rich countries can be grateful that it is the world’s poor who stand on the frontline.
It is they who will find out first – if they haven’t already – what global warming could mean for our collective future.
They are like canaries in the coalmine, and it is grossly, monumentally unfair.
‘The world’s poorest people are like canaries in the coalmine’
It is a big, fat, calamitous injustice, because poor people in Niger, Ethiopia, Haiti, Malawi and Bangladesh have done little to contribute to the global warming that is threatening to push millions to the edge of an abyss.
The war of attrition they’re waging with unpredictable weather; the crop failures, the cattle deaths, the hunger; the intensified fighting over dwindling water supplies; the haemorrhaging of young people from the countryside to the cities in pursuit of non-existent alternatives.
All of these are down to our profligate burning of fossil fuels.
The climate has already changed
Christian Aid has committed itself to placing climate change at the top of its agenda because we know it poses a clear and present danger to our development work.
Our climate is already changing. In Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia, Christian Aid and its local partner organisations have been battling a two-year-long drought which has affected 11 million people. When the rains finally came to Ethiopia, 400 people died as two of the country’s rivers burst their banks.
In Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso in 2005, the harvests failed for the second year running due to drought, putting 8 million people at risk of starvation. Again, when the rains came they wreaked havoc across the region.
‘The climate is no longer predictable’
Drought followed by heavy rain has been part of the rhythm of life in many countries, especially those close to the Sahara desert in the north of Africa or the Kalahari in the south. But Christian Aid is hearing from people in Africa, Latin America and Asia that their climate is no longer predictable.
Two-thirds of the world’s poorest people are farmers who rely almost entirely on the weather. However, they no longer know when rains or drought are going to come. Generations-old knowledge about when to sow, plant, restock herds or move to different pastures is rapidly becoming redundant.
For people whose entire way of life depends on such knowledge, this is catastrophic.
Christian Aid is asking poor people themselves, in communities from Bolivia to Kyrgyzstan, about what changes they have observed in their weather and how these are undermining their way of life.
We are also striving to ensure that these people are prepared for what is approaching. ‘There is a disaster coming,’ says Dr M Rafique of the Bangladesh Intergovernmental Coastal Zone Management body with a heavy heart. ‘All that we can do is try to make people better able to cope.’
It is only fair that we help poor people withstand their changing climate. But there is more we can – and must – do.