Flagship UN Study Shows Accelerating Climate Change on Land, Sea and in the Atmosphere
The UN’s World Meteorological Organization’s Statement on the State of the Global Climate in 2019, showed the effects on socio-economic development, health, migration, displacement, food security and land and marine ecosystems. The report also showed that following years of steady decline, hunger is on the rise, driven by a changing climate and extreme weather events, giving rise to displacement, conflict and violence notably in the Horn of Africa, where it suffered droughts and then unusually heavy rains, factoring in the worst locust outbreak in the past 25 years. Globally, 6.7 million people were displaced due to natural hazards, and the report forecasts internal displacement of 22 million throughout the world in 2019, up from 17.2 million in 2018.
Can Renewables Give Climate-Displaced Women in Bangladesh a New Beginning?
Miriam is one amongst the 1.2 million people the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre estimates are displaced each year in Bangladesh, and she has been climate-displaced multiple times. Women and girls are adversely impacted, and many, leaving children behind, turn to textile factories for long hours and little pay, gaining skills but lacking capital to set up small businesses close by that allow family unity and year-round work. Renewable solar energy programs run by the government could be the missing piece, if only women were allowed access. Now the UN seeks to address that imbalance by putting women at the helm of climate-resilient livelihoods for vulnerable communities.
What Comes After Fossil Fuels?
In a conversation in The New Yorker, climate activist Bill McKibben and journalist Vann R. Newkirk, II, who is looking at the legacy of Hurricane Katrina, Newkirk states it’s time to rethink the “refugee” framework to view climate displaced as having a legitimate and moral claim against policy makers responsible for global warming and who stand to profit from their displacement.