By Julia Dowling
This week I have been keeping a close eye on the Copenhagen Climate Summit that began on Monday, bringing with it delegates from around the world including President Barack Obama. I’ve been reading up on discussions surrounding one of the major controversies being debated at Copenhagen: the idea that industrialized nations owe impoverished nations who suffer most from climate change financial compensation.
The fact of the matter is that the North has largely created the climate change crisis, starting from the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. The United States alone has emitted 25% of global carbon emissions while the US is only 5% of the world’s population. Despite our responsibility for the crisis, it’s the poor citizens of the South that are literally feeling the heat.
Indirect consequences of climate change are close on the horizon for the poorest of the South; an estimated 182 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa could die from an increase in disease directly attributed to climate change. When the rains finally fell after two years of drought in Ethiopia, 400 people died as a result of the river bursting over its parched banks. Even more disconcerting is the instability states will experience from the massive amount of displacement we’re likely to see in the coming years thanks to climate change—between 25 million and 1 billion people in total. According to a
study by the International Organization for Migration, regions and countries most likely to have massive amounts of Internally Displaced Persons due to climate change include Afghanistan, Bangladesh, most of Central America, West Africa, and South East Asia. The common thread between these countries: poor or developing Southern countries that historically have contributed little to the high levels of carbon leading to this climate catastrophe.
This concept, known as the Climate Debt, has been highlighted as a Copenhagen controversy in several publications, including the
New York Times’ article from the opening day of the summit. I knew we were really onto something with Climate Debt when the research assistant of Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, contacted me about an in-depth article she was writing for Rolling Stone. In
“Climate Rage” Ms. Klein highlights the disparities between those who have caused the climate crisis, who are most affected by it, and visionary voices urging for climate reparations to be committed to the South on the global stage of Copenhagen.