Oxfam America Blog

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.”

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Caption: Muluberhan Hailu, of Oxfam partner the Relief Society of Tigray, trains Adi Ha teff farmers to use a rain gauge to measure seasonal rainfall on their farms. Photo: Stephane de Messieres / Oxfam America

If you’ve ever eaten a meal at a traditional Ethiopian restaurant, as I did last weekend (thanks, Addis Red Sea!), you’ve tried teff. It’s the grain used to make injera, the spongy, slightly sour bread that serves as both plate and utensil for your food.

Oddly enough, a couple of days later I heard about teff again at work–or, to be exact, teff farmers, in the village of Adi Ha, in Tigray, Ethiopia.

Newsweek just came out with Issues 2009, a guide for President-elect Obama to tackle those few, minor problems that the world faces this year. Among the solutions is a new Oxfam project, developed in partnership with a private company and a research institute, which could serve as a model for helping poor people survive climate change.

It starts in Adi Ha, where forty percent of households rely on their income from teff, a staple grain in Ethiopia. But recent rises in temperature and decreases in rainfall, striking a region already prone to drought, have made it hard for these farmers to harvest a good crop.

Read the rest of this entry »