HUMANITY VERSUS DEVELOPMENT TOWARDS CLIMATE CHANGE

Leaders of the world's biggest and dirtiest economies have agreed for the first time to limit the warming of the earth to a relatively safe 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) an important target in fighting climate change.
It sounds simple, but it implies a dramatic shift in the way we generate electricity, fuel our cars and build our homes and skyscrapers. It means diverting investments in new power stations from fossil fuels to wind, solar and other renewable which is a politically tricky task in the United States.
It also means wealthy countries need to raise tens of billions of dollars a year to help poor countries develop in cleaner ways than the industrial world did over the last 150 years. "It is in the tropics where the bulk of humanity lives - many of them in poverty - that climate change is hitting now and hitting hardest," suffering the Science, Climate Change, and Poverty.
Many of us take for granted that as long as we have money we can still buy food. However, the reality is much more complicated. If we were to look at the time and energy involved in producing our bowl of breakfast cereal, or worse still a chicken soup, then we’d be shocked not only by the complexity of the global food production system, but also the fragility of it.
Growing and selling food depends on a huge number of people, inputs and processes, from producers and buyers, through to infrastructure for transport, distributors and retailers. However, if you were to select the most important factors that the rest of the system depends on, they would be good land and a favourable climate. The latter is now under threat.
With an increasing world population, and rising demand for meat and dairy products (which are much more wasteful in land and other input requirements) producing enough food is already a challenge.
And to top it off we also have to deal with a rapidly changing climate. There are currently 1 billion hungry people in the world and the number is rising. The plight of these, and the millions of others who are already being hit hard by climate change, is highlighted in a new report published by Oxfam today.
But the truth is that the single most important investment society must make - right now - is to ensure a firm stance on curbing emissions. Whether it takes a million, a billion dollars, or more.
Therefore it is still a big question that will the G8 shift their pollutant industrial policies or else?



Tomas Chali
tomaschali@yahoo.com