climate change

Putting strategies in place to contain climate change is critical to the success of any hunger and malnutrition initiative. Everything that Feed the Future and other international initiatives are hoping to achieve in the near term depends on substantial progress in global efforts to minimize the impact of climate change.

Two broadly accepted goals for the world community are: a) the achievement of fair and open trade; and b) clean-energy development to help mitigate climate change. Without trade, much of the socioeconomic development and poverty reduction we have seen around the world in the last two centuries (from the United States and Western Europe to the “East Asian Tigers” and the BRIC nations: Brazil, Russia, India, China) would not have occurred. And without the development of clean-energy, we will not be able to prevent future climate change, and we will not be able to counter the effects of the climate change that is now inevitable.

As U.S. policymakers grapple with how to address the effects of climate change in poor countries, they may find it tempting to redirect development assistance to cover the costs of helping these countries adapt to climate change. But development assistance and adaptation must not be cast as competitors for the same pool of resources. Adapting to climate change is an additional burden imposed on the developing world, so the means for dealing with that burden should also be additional.

When developing countries reject internationally-set limits on greenhouse gas emissions, it’s not as though they are taking a “heads in the sand” approach. Many developing countries—Bangladesh or the Maldives, for example—take climate change and its consequences very seriously. Their objections to the limits are largely about fairness; they argue that the countries responsible for greenhouse gas accumulation should bear the bulk of the costs of mitigation.

Thus far, climate change negotiations have focused almost exclusively on limiting and reducing (“mitigating”) greenhouse gas emissions. It was only in 2007, in its Fourth Assessment Report, that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began to directly address the issue of adaptation, noting that more attention to adaptation is required, and that adaptive capacity is connected to social and economic development. Some of the best adaptation is, in fact, economic growth that provides poor households and poor countries with resources to adjust and cope with change. Adaptation also entails building strong institutions within these countries that can respond to the changing climate, such as agricultural research and extension services, public education, and health care systems.

One of the main sticking points in the negotiations is agreeing on binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Developing countries have consistently maintained that they should not be held to binding limits and will only agree to them if rich countries pledge significant compensation in return. Rich countries, including the United States, have pledged that by 2050 they will reduce their own emissions to 80 percent of 1990 levels, but they balk at the idea of compensation.

The challenge of climate change will either move the world forward toward a more sustainable future, or drive a wedge between rich and poor and usher in generations of troubled global relations. The emissions legacy of the past, and the unavoidable emissions of the coming years, make it inevitable that climate change will worsen. To avoid the worst outcomes, adaptation—or adjustments that moderate harms—is critically important.

Transitioning to clean energy from fossil fuels won’t be simple, and it will take several years, if not decades. The main mechanism is likely to be a cap-and-trade system to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The “cap” is a ceiling on the total emissions allowed per year. Major emitters—such as coal plants, oil refiners, and natural gas producers—will purchase a designated number of emissions permits. Emitters may “trade” in permits if they need more than their share or find they can do with less. Over time, the cap is lowered and emitters are forced to conserve energy and transition to clean alternatives—alternatives that will largely depend on a vibrant manufacturing sector, able to produce the major components and subcomponents of new technologies in demand.

“As leaders of the world’s major economies,” noted the G-20 communiqué from Pittsburgh, “we are working for a resilient, sustainable, and green recovery. We underscore anew our resolve to take strong action to address the threat of dangerous climate change.”

Climate change, like economic recovery, is another major problem nations must face together. The way forward on climate change is fairly clear, but the magnitude of this challenge is far greater than any other issue on the horizon. At this point, the scientific evidence of climate change is unequivocal. If we don’t take strong enough action on climate change, the consequences could be catastrophic for everyone.

In 1964, President Johnson launched the War on Poverty in Martin County in Eastern Kentucky. The photograph of Johnson kneeling on local resident Tom Fletcher’s porch with Fletcher and three of his children in the picture is an iconic image in the War on Poverty. The focus of the camera is on the two men, Johnson’s profile and Fletcher’s worn face with hardened lines and rotted teeth.

In December 2009, the city of Copenhagen played host to governments from around the world as leaders met for two weeks of negotiations on a new international treaty on climate change. The current treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, was developed in the mid-1990s and will expire in 2012. Scientists have learned a great deal about the dimensions and dynamics of the climate change problem since the Kyoto agreement was drafted.

Family nutrition is directly affected by women’s ability to farm. Women farmers grow more than half of all the food in developing countries, and up to 80 percent in parts of Africa, generally in the form of small-scale crops for household consumption. Climate change has already begun to affect agricultural production and, consequently, women’s livelihoods and their ability to support their families’ nutritional needs. Extension efforts need to reach women, who often do not have access to information that would help them make better decisions about how to adapt to climate change.

Scientists talk about the “feedback loops” that occur as climate change accelerates. Rising levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases cause warming temperatures that lead to melting glaciers; melting glaciers reduce the Earth’s ability to absorb CO2; the additional CO2 accelerates the warming trend, melting layers of permafrost, beneath which more CO2 is stored and then released. One climate-changing event leads to another, which leads to another, and so on, reinforcing the changes and accelerating their deadly consequences.

Climate change will tax the ability of the world’s farmers to meet the ever-growing demand for food and other agricultural products. These effects will be most strongly felt in the lower latitudes, where the poorest countries are concentrated. By 2020, for example, African farmers in some countries could see their crop yields reduced by as much as 50 percent. Similarly bleak scenarios have been forecast for other regions of the Global South.

Cell phones have revolutionized communications in developing countries. In less than a decade, people living in some of the most underdeveloped areas of the world have gone from having no way to communicate outside their villages to being able to talk to almost anyone they wish to speak with. In Fanwargu, Burkina Faso, Natama Alimata calls to find out how many other women in her co-op are planning to use the mill that day and what times are open before she sets out on the 15-mile walk to mill the sorghum her family grows on their small farm.

Negotiations taking place in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 2009 will bring together countries from around the world. The Copenhagen conference will focus on formulating a successor to the current treaty on climate change, the Kyoto Protocol. Negotiated in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol went into full force in 2005. It set binding limits on CO2 emissions for some countries; 35 industrialized nations agreed to cut their emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The Kyoto commitment period ends in 2012. What will a post-Kyoto global agreement on climate change look like? This is what the Copenhagen negotiations are supposed to answer, or begin to answer, since the process of finalizing an agreement will culminate in 2012.

Poverty rates in rural America are higher than in urban areas of the country. Of the 386 counties that are persistently poor (have been poor for decades), rural counties outnumber urban counties by almost 9 to 1. Child poverty rates are higher in rural areas than urban, and rural children are more likely than their urban counterparts to live in extreme poverty (with family income of half the poverty level or less), and to receive free or reduced-price school lunch.

If it were ever really true that what’s good for the environment is bad for business and vice versa, the tradeoff has swiftly become an anachronism, largely because of the pressing need to address climate change. Climate change will be a huge challenge—and a tremendous economic opportunity. It’s possible to battle climate change and create jobs at the same time.

Rosebud and other Native American reservations in the northern Great Plains have some of the best wind power resources in the country. It’s not just how often the wind blows, or the speeds it reaches—it’s the density of the wind and the endless ridgelines that stretch across reservation lands that make this part of the country ideal for converting wind into electricity. Government studies estimate that the two dozen reservations in the northern Great Plains have sufficient wind resources to produce electricity to power half the United States.

Each week thousands of heavy trucks roll through Hunt’s Point—60,000 diesel truck trips per week. The neighborhood has some of the lowest air quality in the country. More adults and children from Hunt’s Point are hospitalized each year with asthma attacks than anywhere else in New York.