Upside Down World

This morning, Fatin, a young woman from Bangladesh, showed us pictures of the immense destruction that last month's cyclone caused to her village. Cyclone Sidr was the worst on record, killing at least 3400 people and leaving survivors devastated. Researchers from the Bangladesh Center for Advanced Studies attribute the unprecedented intensity of the storm to—you guessed it—climate change. In fact, Bangladesh is experiencing worsening droughts, floods, and salt contamination of its drinking water from rising sea levels. As Fatin told us, "the climate change predictions that world leaders are discussing in the Convention Center are already happening in Bangladesh."

That's the message that many civil society organizations from the Global South are bringing to Bali. Climate change is here now, so it's not enough to talk about reducing greenhouse gases in the future. The world's poorest people, who are most threatened by the results of carbon pollution, need help today. This help is not charity. It's their human right—and governments are obligated under international law to provide it.

In the climate change jargon, such help is called adaptation. The UN has created an Adaptation Fund to enable poorer countries to adjust to a warming world. It's supposed to finance projects like infrastructure to guard against floods (like the levees New Orleans was supposed to have), improved water supplies for drought areas, and new agricultural techniques. But so far, the Adaptation Fund has only collected $67 million dollars—less than people in the US spend on suntan lotion each month, according to Oxfam. Meanwhile, the actual cost of effective adaptation is somewhere around $100 billion a year.

So how are the world's poorest countries making up the short-fall? For the most part, they're not. But there are some countries that have no choice but to take action now. Yesterday, we spoke with Amjad Abdullah, a government delegate from the Maldives. He told us that his country is literally building a new island on higher ground to accommodate thousands of citizens who have been washed out of their homes by the encroaching Pacific. They are financing the construction by borrowing more money from the industrialized countries that caused climate change in the first place. The finance minister of Fiji has also asked for more loans to help deal with the effect of rising sea levels. Countries that have cash to spare—thanks to their carbon-based economies-are happy oblige.

So apparently there is money to be made not just from "mitigation" (or reducing carbon emissions, which is the flip side of the adaptation coin) but also from addressing the impacts of climate change on the poor.

Something is obviously wrong here.

Instead of increasing the debt burden of countries that have been made poor through slavery, colonialism, and the economic arm-twisting of "free trade," the industrialized countries need to be held accountable for the damage that they have caused by changing the Earth's climate through carbon pollution.

In fact, it's the rich countries that owe a debt to the poor. Industrialized countries have used much more than their fair share of the Earth's atmosphere as a "carbon dump." The World Rainforest Movement calculates that, "On a per capita basis, the US currently uses twelve times what it should be entitled to, and the UK nearly six times its share. Bangladesh --one of the most vulnerable countries to sea level rise and other climate alterations-- is ten times below its quota, Sudan 15 times, Tanzania 22 times." Call it a Carbon Debt and consider that it is much larger than the financial debt of the highly indebted poor countries. If the world were not upside-down, governments would be meeting in Bali to figure out how industrialized countries are going to repay their Carbon Debt. We know of a village in Bangladesh where they could begin.


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