Browse by Theme: Climate Change

Families who participated in the Nampula Adaptation to Climate Change project in northern Mozambique were able to grow more food, better respond to crises, and save more money. Adopting many climate change conscious practices in their fields helped them achieve this. One of the things families invested in when they got more savings and credit was their children’s education. Here is more about what the project achieved.

Denis Tumwesige used to make his living illegally cutting trees in protected forests in Uganda, until he got arrested. Instead of a jail sentence, the local officials connected him with CARE’s Forest Resources Sector Transparency (FOREST) project, which taught him about the importance of forest conservation. Denis then wrote a song about forests, which is a huge hit, and is routinely played on national radio. The song succeeded in raising awareness of forest policies. Here is what else the project achieved. 

Under the Fiji presidency of COP23 in Bonn, Germany, we have heard many stories of the devastation faced by the Pacific islands during Typhoon Haiyan, Cyclone Winston and Cyclone Pam. We have heard how Fiji is already having to relocate entire villages permanently because of sea level rise and coastal erosion, and that water sources are becoming contaminated.

Aid spending by the UK is once again in the news. This time a Mail on Sunday campaign and petition has secured a Westminster Hall debate on 13 June. Up for discussion (but not review) will be the 0.7% target set into law at the end of the last parliament that obliges the UK to spend this percentage of its Gross National Income on overseas development assistance (ODA). But at a time when there are 91 million people in need of emergency assistance across 35 declared crises, the highest in a generation, climate change is daily demonstrating its disruptive and destructive force on the lives of the most vulnerable, and global health crises emerge on an annual basis, surely the only thing outrageous about spending 7p in every £10 on tackling global problems is that it is so little.

From afar, the southern African countries of Madagascar and Malawi will not figure in conversations about the disasters affecting the world. When I told people I was going there on an emergency response deployment they looked at me baffled and asked: “Why – what’s happening there?”

People have a certain image of what constitutes an emergency. To someone you ask in the street they would probably imagine panic, chaos and people desperately trying to save their families. And that is true but not always the case, as emergencies get more drawn out due to long-standing conflict, like in Syria, or are slow-burning crises such as Ethiopia’s drought brought on by the climate impacts of El Nino. In these situations, emergency is embedded in everyday life – thinking about the safest route to go to the market or children dropping out of school becomes a part of daily life. And this is when it is not so easy to differentiate humanitarian and development approaches as short-term creeps into long-term.

Last month I visited Tigray, Northern Ethiopia, to interview farmers and livestock traders faced with the drought effects of one of the most devastating El Niños in 50 years. What are their coping strategies in the face of extreme weather patterns? How are those strategies linked to national and international market systems? And how, through these systems, can we bring about a better deal for those in the supply chain typically made more vulnerable by drought – namely, women?