No Justice In Climate Change
| Thu Nov. 8, 2007 12:00 PM PST
When it comes to global warming, discussions tend to get real abstract, real fast. How will climbing temperatures actually affect you? Well, it depends where you live—and how rich you are (or aren't). According to a forthcoming study, climate change will disproportionately impact the world's poor.
Jonathan Patz, a professor of public health and the environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is one of the study's lead authors (and also an IPCC author). Patz says it's time for those of us in the gas-guzzling-est of countries to come to terms with the painful (and inconvenient) truth: Our lifestyle is bad news for the developing world—and we've got an ethical problem on our hands. In a UW-Madison press release, Patz says:
If energy demand drives up the price of corn, for example, this can inflict undue burden on poor or malnourished populations or shift agricultural areas away from other traditional food crops.
And then there are the health issues:
There are many serious diseases that are sensitive to climate, and as earth's climate changes, so too can the range and transmission of such diseases....Many of these climate-sensitive diseases, such as malaria, malnutrition, and diarrhea, affect children.
This isn't the first time someone has pointed out the unfairness of climate change. Among others, Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier has noted that her people's carbon output is a tiny fraction of the U.S.'s, yet global warming is already threatening the Inuit way of life. The IPCC has also predicted that poor people—particularly those in Africa—will be hardest hit by climate change.
To read the study, you'll have to wait till next week, when it will be published in the journal EcoHealth, but you can already check out these cool maps—one shows countries' relative carbon outputs, while the other shows their vulnerability to the effects of climate change.
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Comments
Submitted by Mexican pharmacies online (not verified) on Thu Nov. 8, 2007 12:30 PM PST.
Unfortunately Mother Nature does not care about your economic shortcomings. We should have been more active in preventing global warming before it has got to this stage.
Well said....
Submitted by Nathanial on Sun Jul. 5, 2009 12:16 AM PDT.
It's true mother nature does not care about your economic shortcomings. We should have been more active in preventing global warming before it has got to this stage. But if some how you maintain a balance between you and the mother nature, nothing is better than this...
it's somehow not fair, don't
Submitted by sam (not verified) on Sun Oct. 4, 2009 11:40 PM PDT.
it's somehow not fair, don't you think? it seems that world's poor are vulnerable to everything: disasters, hunger, illnesses... and now this climate change. but still more annoying is that mostly those not belonging to this world talk about it, its problems and as a rule those are just words... concerned about all this have used to dowload great books concerning global warming from http://torrents.rapid4me.com and to my mind this climate change will impact everybody, no matter his social status. I wish those able to stop it somehow acted instead of talking
Climate change.
Submitted by Aasim on Wed Nov. 4, 2009 6:10 AM PST.
Unfortunately Mother Nature does not care about your economic shortcomings. It seems that world's poor are vulnerable to everything: disasters, hunger, illnesses... and now this climate change. but still more annoying is that mostly those not belonging to this world talk about it, its problems and as a rule those are just words...
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