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Climate change campaign summary
Climate change is like eating a slap-up meal then handing the bill to the world’s poor
Ricardo Navarro, El Salvador
Climate change is the greatest challenge facing humanity. But it is not just an environmental issue, it is a development issue, and a global justice issue.
It is our excessive carbon emissions that are driving climate change. Rich countries are responsible for almost three quarters of global emissions. But it is poor countries that are bearing the brunt of the impact. Hundreds of millions face drought, floods, starvation, disease and death.
WDM is calling on the UK government to take action to reduce the UK’s emissions and show the rest of the world that it can be done. WDM is campaigning to stop climate injustice.
The impacts
160,000 people are already dying each day because of climate change. The poorest in the world are the most affected by climate change yet they are the least responsible.
Flooding: Vast areas of land will become submerged as sea levels rise with increasing temperatures. Countries such as Bangladesh are already experiencing extreme flooding.
Drought: As temperatures increase droughts worsen. Droughts will endanger the food supply of hundreds of millions of people.
Disease: With temperatures on the rise, warmer wetter weather will increase the number of mosquitoes which spread diseases such as malaria. Malaria is increasing in Rwanda, Tanzania and Kenya as a result of a changing climate.
The responsibility
Rich countries, like the UK, owe their prosperity to decades of overuse and reliance on fossil fuels and are historically responsible for 70 per cent of manmade carbon emissions in the atmosphere. Our whole way of life is based on burning things like coal, oil and gas. We burn them for our cars and planes, our heating, our factories and for electricity. But it doesn’t have to be like this. Rich countries have a moral responsibility to lead the way towards a low carbon economy.
The solution
Climate change is happening but we can stop it becoming catastrophic. This means keeping the increase in average global temperature to less than 2°C. Internationally an agreement is needed to ensure that, at the very least, this goal is met. In the UK it means reducing carbon emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050 in the UK.
The UK Government seems fixed on market based solutions to get us out of the problem – like carbon trading. But we cannot buy our way out of the effects of climate change. To effectively tackle climate change we need our government to lead the way in reducing emissions, showing the rest of the world that it can be done
WDM is calling on the UK government to:
- Introduce a strong and effective climate change law to reduce the UK’s emissions
- Implement an environmental tax that is high enough to curb the growth in aviation emissions. Aviation is the UK’s fastest growing emissions source.
- Support far-reaching international targets to reduce global emissions
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