Curbing Climate Change: Essential to Ending Global Poverty and Meeting the MDGs

• The Episcopal Church has committed to advocacy for the Millennium Development Goals – which aim to cut deadly global poverty in half by 2015 – as a mission priority for the current triennium.
• Thanks to the advocacy of millions of Americans, the United States over the past five years has begun to make significant commitments to the MDGs through expanded foreign aid and debt cancellation for poor countries. That progress threatens to be undermined irrevocably, however, by the effects of climate change, which the UN Development Program calls one of the most significant threats to the achievement of the MDGs.
• Around the world, the increasing frequency and severity of floods, droughts, and hurricanes place severe strains on the ability of poor countries to fight ongoing challenges related to poverty, including food insecurity, indebtedness, diseases like AIDS and malaria, environmental degradation, armed conflicts, economic shocks, and the effects of globalization.
• For example, without significant efforts to curb climate change, 75 million to 250 million more people in Africa could face severe water shortages by 2020, and hunger could increase dramatically as changing climates threaten to cut in half the yield of rain-fed African crops.
• Conversely, just as climate change exacerbates poverty, poverty also is hastening climate change. Most poor people around the world lack access to a reliable-energy source, an imbalance that must be addressed in any attempt to lift a community out of poverty. Unfortunately, financial necessity often forces the choice of energy sources like oil and coal that threaten to increase significantly the world’s greenhouse emissions and thus accelerate the effects of climate change.
• ”While the world’s poor walk the Earth with a light carbon footprint they are bearing the brunt of unsustainable management of our ecological interdependence. In rich countries, coping with climate change to date has largely been a matter of adjusting thermostats, dealing with longer, hotter summers, and observing seasonal shifts. .. By contrast, when global warming changes weather patterns in the Horn of Africa, it means that crops fail and people go hungry, or that women and young girls spend more hours collecting water.” http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/hdr_20072008_summary_english.pdf
• As Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori wrote in an opinion article in the San Francisco Chronicle for Earth Day 2007: “This cycle – poverty that begets climate change, and vice versa – threatens the future of all people, rich and poor alike, and of all things in the world that God so loves.” (Click here to read the full article.)
• There are African leaders who are recogning and acting on climate change. The 2004 winner of the Nobel Prize, Wangari Muta Maathai. She has assisted women throughout Africa in planting more than 20 million trees on their farms and on schools and church compounds through the Green Belt Movement. But it is our carbon footprint that is most destrutive worldwide.

Climate change is also an issue of global security

• Earlier this year, a panel of retired US generals and admirals released a report (http://securityandclimate.cna.org) that highlights climate change as a serious national security threat to the U.S. The report outlines how “climate change acts as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world,” and calls on the US to help stabilize the climate at levels that will “avoid significant disruption to global security and stability.” The report also spotlights the importance of “global partnerships that help developing countries build the capacity and resiliency to better manage climate impacts” to help avoid state and regional destabilization.

• Increased financial resources are necessary if communities in poor countries are to take early action to reduce their vulnerability to the effects of climate change. The governments of rich countries, such as the U.S., must help—as they bear responsibility for much of the damage. This financing must be new and in addition to existing foreign-aid commitments and must be channeled in a transparent and accountable way through agencies and international institutions with expertise in development and climate change. The U.S. must also make significant commitments to curb its own greenhouse-gas emissions.

Why should the U.S. lead? What about other big polluters like India and China?

• We must also push those developing countries like China and India that are increasingly producing greenhouse gas to reduce their emissions. However, we must recognize that they are not among those countries responsible for causing the climate change that has already occurred. Additionally, while their total emission levels are high, their per-capita emissions are nowhere near those of the U.S. The U.S. holds the largest economy in the world, it has a responsibility in all areas of development assistance to play a role proportionate to its impact on the global economy.

What should the 110th Congress do to address climate change and global poverty?

• Time is short. The 110th Congress must act immediately to assert U.S. leadership in the fight to curb climate change. Federal legislation not only would reduce our nation’s greenhouse emissions; it would also give the U.S. an opportunity to influence global negotiations on climate change, a move that could strengthen our relationships abroad.
• Currently, the most prominent climate change legislation in Congress is a bill introduced by Senators Joseph Lieberman (I-CT) and John Warner (R-VA) called America's Climate Security Act (S. 2191). This legislation does two important things for global poverty:

(1) It provides for a critical reduction in our nation’s own greenhouse-gas emissions that cause climate change and exacerbate the effects of global poverty around the world;

(2) It provides – for the first time in U.S. development assistance – funding specifically targeted to assist poor people around the world already facing consequences from global warming. The world's poorest nations desperately need this assistance to adapt to severe climate changes. We support providing this funding to vulnerable communities by using the revenue raised from auctioning permits for greenhouse gas emissions.