1 January 2016, Truthdig, So what was the most significant event of 2015? It wasn’t a single event. Rather, it was a worsening of something that started several years before. It was the fast-increasing, huge migration of immigrants—many running for fear of their lives—making their dangerous and often fatal way by land and across the Mediterranean, the Gulf of Aden, the Red Sea and the oceans of Asia. It is the greatest forced mass movement of refugees since World War II, caused by the confluence of civil war, brutal regimes, sectarian and ethnic hatred, and climate change all coming together in a world too weak and preoccupied to deal with such powerful forces….. While war is the biggest single force behind the mass migration, there are other causes, interrelated in complex ways. The best illustration of this is climate change. An organization that has been assisting refugees since 1951, the International Organization for Migration, reported that “Climate change is expected to trigger growing population movements within and across borders, as a result of such factors as increasing intensity of extreme weather events, sea-level rise and acceleration of environmental degradation. In addition, climate change will have adverse consequences for livelihoods, public health, food security, and water availability. This in turn will impact on human mobility, likely leading to a substantial rise in the scale of migration and displacement.” According to the organization, there are no reliable estimates of climate change-induced migration but 200 million people by 2050 is “the most widely cited estimate.” Read More here
Category Archives: People Stress
30 December 2015, Climate News Network, El Niño and war drive aid agencies to the brink. Governments must act immediately to end conflicts and counter the impact of climate disruption so as to avoid a humanitarian catastrophe affecting millions. The global humanitarian system, designed to save those at risk of dying because of human or natural disasters, faces unprecedented demands in 2016 from levels of strain it has never before had to face, a leading development agency says. With more than 10 million people in a single African country expected to need international help next year, Oxfam says the effects of a super El Niño will intensify the pressures on a system already struggling to help people devastated by conflict.If governments act now, Oxfam says, relief can reach those in the greatest need while there is still time. But if they don’t the crisis will overwhelm it and its counterparts who provide relief, and they will not be able to save those at risk.Oxfam estimates the El Niño weather system could leave tens of millions of people facing hunger, water shortages and disease next year, and says it is already too late for some regions to avoid a major emergency.In Ethiopia the government estimates that 10.2 million people will need humanitarian assistance in 2016, at a cost of US$1.4 billion, because of a drought which is being exacerbated by El Niño. Read More here
28 December 2015, Climate News network, Markets cannot solve the climate crisis. How did we get to where we are now? “Free range” capitalism could be the explanation for climate change, and needs taming, says one writer. It may not be polite to mention Karl Marx in America, but leading thinkers on the left think that capitalism may be the cause of climate change, and that to save the planet the system needs fundamental reform. According to a new book the profit motive, which drives capitalism above all other considerations, forces it to extract everything from the planet that will generate a surplus, at the expense of real benefits to humans and ecosystems. Fossil Capital: the Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, by Andreas Malm, out in hardback from Verso in January 2016, analyses capitalism’s role in global warming by delving into its past. The book builds on the work of Naomi Klein’s 2014 This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate. Both ask whether catastrophic climate change can be averted without at least a major makeover – or the outright elimination – of capitalism. Malm, a professor of human ecology at Sweden’s Lund University, starts with James Watt’s patenting of the rotating steam engine in 1784. This was also the first year that rising carbon dioxide and methane levels were observed in polar ice. First Malm attacks the accepted theories of David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus. who developed and reinforced the capitalist notion that markets are the cure for all social ills. He shows that mills adopted coal power instead of water only because it enabled mill owners to move to populated areas to find docile and skilled workers, who were in short supply in the countryside. More biddable Coal enabled this move because, once out of the ground, it is highly portable. The machines, of course, eliminated many jobs and made others both simpler and more difficult. Owners started hiring women and children because they were easier to control than adult men. Read more here
18 December 2015, Climate News Network, Climate swells tide of migrants. A new report coinciding with the UN’s International Migrants Day says that climate change is one of the many factors increasing the flow of refugees worldwide. Thousands of people – old, young and babies –struggle to reach the coasts of Europe, many dying en route. In south-east Asia, dozens of Rohingya refugees from Burma suffocate on packed boats, locked by people traffickers below deck while trying to escape their homeland. Children from Central America die of thirst in the desert, trying to cross into the US. Some of these refugees are escaping persecution or warfare back home. Others are fleeing from gang violence, or simply searching for a better life. And some have seen their lands degraded by climate change and their livelihoods threatened by floods or drought. A new report produced by the UK-based Ethical Journalism Network (EJN), and partly authored by journalists from the Climate News Network, concludes that much needs to be improved in the way the world’s media reports on migration issues. Read more here