The Human Cost of Climate Change
By Emma Brindal, Climate Justice Co-ordinator, Friends of the Earth Australia
Climate change impacts are already dangerous for many of the world’s people and highlight the necessity of rapidly moving away from dependence on coal and other fossil fuels. The fact that impacts are now happening at a much faster rate and at lower temperatures than predicted makes this action all the more urgent.
Many of the people least responsible for greenhouse emissions are already bearing the brunt of climate change impacts, and will continue to do so. Our Pacific Island neighbours are among the most vulnerable communities to the impacts of climate change, with many experiencing impacts on food and water security, health and infrastructure. Sea level rise has meant that since 2000 two villages in the Pacific Island nation of Kiribati have been evacuated. Meanwhile, the people of the Carteret Islands, 85 km northeast of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea, are trying to secure funding to enable them to evacuate to Bougainville as rising sea levels will soon make their islands uninhabitable. They will be some of the first climate refugees to have to leave their island homes.
Most of our Pacific Island neighbours have carbon footprints which are a fraction of most Australians’. As the one of the largest per capita greenhouse gas polluters in the world, Australia has a responsibility to address climate refugees. This responsibility must entail providing funding for communities such as the Carteret Islanders, setting up an immigration program for climate refugees to relocate to Australia and making deep and urgent reductions in our emissions. A domestic program to accept climate refugees must have a quota additional to our current humanitarian program to ensure that we provide asylum to refugees fleeing political persecution.
With a sea level rise of only 50 centimetres, 200 million climate refugees are predicted to be displaced worldwide by 2050. Many of these will be internally displaced, but some nations, such as the tiny island nation of Tuvalu will have to be completely evacuated, creating many climate refugees without a nation. One of the world’s most eminent scientists, James Hansen from the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has said that a sea level rise measured in metres may occur this century. The implications of sea level rise on this scale are mind-boggling and should serve as a stark warning that radical emission reductions must be made now.
Climate refugees (or any people displaced for environmental reasons) are not protected or recognised under the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Nor do these incredibly vulnerable people have protection under any national laws. In April 2007, the Labor Party introduced policies in its national platform relating to climate refugees in the Pacific, including a policy to develop a coalition of Pacific Rim nations to accept climate refugees from nations that become uninhabitable due to climate change, as well as assisting intra-country relocations. There is still some way to go to ensure that these policies are developed and implemented, but this is certainly a positive step, especially in light of the former Howard government’s refusal to meet with Pacific leaders to discuss the issue.
However, the unwillingness of Australian federal and state governments to challenge the domination of the fossil fuel industry means that Australia is complicit in ensuring that in the long term, human suffering on a mass scale will occur, with huge displacement of climate refugees around the world. In a recent paper titled Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim? James Hansen and colleagues state that: “preservation of [the] climate requires that most remaining fossil fuel carbon is never emitted into the atmosphere”.
Governments in Australia have been attempting to justify continued expansion of the coal industry with the false promise of carbon capture and storage (CCS) or so-called clean coal. CCS, a technology that is not going to be commercially viable for some years – if indeed at all – simply cannot enable us to make emission reductions in the timeframe required. The (conservative) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has stated that global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2015. Aside from these timeframe constraints, storing vast amounts of liquefied carbon dioxide underground poses unacceptable risks to future generations.
The economic cost of reducing emissions is also used as an excuse for limiting greenhouse emission reductions. However, as noted by the Alliance for Small Island States in a submission last year, “the value of preserving island sovereignty and cultures cannot be compared with the monetary costs of mitigation”.
Over one hundred and fifty years of digging up and burning fossil fuels has brought us to this critical moment in the history of the planet. If we are to prevent irreversible and catastrophic changes to the earth’s climate, fossil fuels must be kept in the ground.
