Oxfam America Blog

They say the impacts of climate change are “blind” to class, creed, or gender.

But activists in Copenhagen say, in reality, women in poor countries bear the brunt of global warming’s terrible human cost.

In the province of Balochistan, near the Afghani border, the shifting climate has been disastrous for traditional family structure and stability, according to Rehana Bibi Khilji. “The common woman in our area of rural Pakistan is very impacted,” said Khilji, founder of Balochistan human rights group Hope PK.

L to R: Constance Okollet, Ulamila Kurai Wragg, Rehana bibi Khilji, Lorena Aguilar Revelo, Mary Robinson, and the moderator, Danish journalist Lene Johansen. Photo by Emily Gertz.

She was one of several panelists speaking before an audience of around 200 at today’s “Women’s Leadership on Climate Justice” program in Copenhagen — women who have seen firsthand the damage done by changing environmental conditions, agricultural cycles, and water supplies. Read the rest of this entry »

Violeta Sithole, with her son on her back, prepares her field to plant beans. Photo by Chris Hufstader/Oxfam America.

When the lights went out at 9pm last Wednesday with a loud click, I was just finishing up in the shower and was a little late getting out in time to find my flashlight. I was in a comfortable concrete house in the village of Inhassune, Mozambique, recently vacated by the South African manager of a 250-acre jatropha plantation run by ESV Group. Since he and the rest of the officials had cleared out, there was no electricity unless you can buy the fuel to run the generator, which costs about $10 an hour. I paid for three hours a night, from six to nine.

Jatropha trees produce seeds you can press to make biodiesel: it is one of the new biofuels we are hearing so much about as an alternative to oil. Oxfam is looking at how growing biofuel crops affects poor agricultural communities, and I interviewed a few farmers to see what they have to say about it all.

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Andrew Blejwas is Oxfam’s regional communications officer for the US.  

When I first moved to Alabama five years ago, just about all I knew about the state was that it was hot, and Montgomery was known as both the cradle of the Confederacy and the birthplace of the Civil Rights Movement. But mostly, it was hot. So last week when we had what amounted to a cold snap—about three days of weather in the 50s—conversations usually started with some variation on the theme of global warming: “So much for global warming,” someone would say. Or, “We really could use some of that global warming about now.”

If only it were that easy to turn global warming on and off like a switch. For a lot of us, global warming is a euphemism for climate change, something we don’t fully understand, something happening somewhere else—certainly “not in my backyard.”  Even in sweltering Alabama, we don’t talk about global warming until it gets cold. But climate change is happening, and it is in our backyard.

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Did you know that “global warming” is too depressing to talk about these days? Yep, it’s true. Instead,  we can call it “our deteriorating atmosphere,” like it’s a beloved old relative who’s begun the unavoidable aging process. And “energy efficiency” just sounds scary. Instead, it’s all about “saving money for a more prosperous future.”

In the Carteret Islands, Papua New Guinea, a rise in sea level is cutting off people’s supplies of fresh water and fertile land. The islands’ residents will be among the first people to be forced to migrate due to climate change. Photo: Toby Parkinson / Oxfam

While we’re at it, there’s got to be a more upbeat way to talk about people in the world’s most vulnerable communities, who bear the brunt of the effects of climate change. Instead of poor, perhaps we could call them “those of lesser wealth.”  And the Carteret Islanders of Papua New Guinea, whose homes are disappearing due to rising sea levels? They’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time–or in other words, “locationally challenged.”

OK, so I made up the last couple of examples. But the first two come from a very real recent attempt to re-brand climate change to make it more palatable to the public.

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Moh Mariko, born in the year when it rained a lot (1945). Photo by Rebecca Blackwell/Oxfam America

Moh Mariko was not sure what year she was born, since it isn’t important and no one pays attention to such things in her village in southern Mali. “I was born in the year when there was a lot of rain,” she says. (Her government ID said it was 1945.)

Rain, that’s the important thing in the Sahel. When there is none, people suffer terribly. They can’t grow crops to feed themselves, and they can’t grow cotton to sell for cash, so they can’t support their families with enough food, medicine, and clothes and books and school fees for their children.
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We’ve all heard about the deadly wildfires that just raged through southern Australia–and according to a story in Time magazine this week, climate change may be fanning the flames.

While we still aren’t certain what caused these fast-moving fires, which have claimed as many as 200 lives, global warming has created weather conditions in Australia that cause fires to burn faster–or increase the risk of a spark turning into a blaze.

“The driest inhabited continent on the planet, Australia has warmed 0.9 degrees C since 1950, and climate models predict the country could warm further by 2070,” writes Time’s Bryan Walsh. “Heat waves and drought set the table for wildfires, and temperatures in the worst hit areas have been over 110 degrees F, while humidity has bottomed out near zero.”

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A woman walking in the Kup District of Chimbu Province, Papua New Guinea, where people are vulnerable to more frequent and intense cyclones caused by climate change. Photo: Jerry Galea / Oxfam

Yesterday, some friends of mine had a daughter, who they named Abigail Rose. In the photos I saw this morning, she looks impossibly miniature, almost too tiny to be real; yet up close, she also sports a lot of thick brown hair and an oddly thoughtful expression.

I don’t have kids, so I’m sort of an outsider on the whole process, and I find it just a little bit mind-boggling. Looking at the photos, I can’t help but wonder: What will life be like for someone born in 2009? How will Abigail’s world be different from ours?

Sometimes I worry about that world. Take a new study released yesterday, which found that the effects of climate change are now irreversible–or, in the words of Science Daily, “To a large extent, there’s no going back.”

Led by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the study found that even if all polluters stopped emitting carbon tomorrow, the effects of human-induced global warming could last for the next 1,000 years or more. That’s way beyond Abigail’s lifetime, her children’s, and even her great-great-grandchildren’s.

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