An email from Oxfam alerted me that this is happening: An unprecedented number of people, 20 million in 4 African countries, are at risk of famine--the most since WWII. This is exactly the future that the climate maps of mid-century drought foretell. It is already underway. Where drought and political instability coincide, the people suffer and die. The climate factor is easily overlooked in the news. These are people who have contributed almost nothing to climate change. The call for $4.4 billion to avert this famine is tiny compared to military expenditures, but the world, and the U.S., has not responded. Not long from now, as such droughts drive people to the coastal cities, they will be met by millions coming the other way, driven by rising seas.
Some excerpts from "Climate Change as Genocide," Tom Clare on Truthdig, 4-22-17. http://www.truthdig.com/report
Not since World War II have more human beings been at risk from disease
and starvation than at this very moment. On March 10th, Stephen O’Brien,
under secretary-general of the United Nations for humanitarian affairs,
informed
the Security Council that 20 million people in three African
countries—Nigeria, Somalia, and South Sudan—as well as in Yemen were
likely to die if not provided with emergency food and medical aid. “We
are at a critical point in history,” he declared.
“Already at the beginning of the year we are facing the largest
humanitarian crisis since the creation of the U.N.” Without coordinated
international action, he added, “people will simply starve to death
[or] suffer and die from disease.” ...
Major famines have, of course, occurred before, but never in memory on such a scale in four places simultaneously. According to O’Brien,
7.3 million people are at risk in Yemen, 5.1 million in the Lake Chad
area of northeastern Nigeria, 5 million in South Sudan, and 2.9 million
in Somalia. In each of these countries, some lethal combination
of war, persistent drought, and political instability is causing
drastic cuts in essential food and water supplies. Of those 20 million
people at risk of death, an estimated 1.4 million are young children. ....
Climate change is also intensifying the dangers faced by the poor and
marginalized in another way. As interior croplands turn to dust, ever
more farmers are migrating to cities, especially coastal ones. If you
want a historical analogy, think of the great Dust Bowl migration
of the “Okies” from the interior of the U.S. to the California coast in
the 1930s. In today’s climate-change era, the only available housing
such migrants are likely to find will be in vast and expanding
shantytowns (or “informal settlements,” as they’re euphemistically
called), often located in floodplains and low-lying coastal areas
exposed to storm surges and sea-level rise. As global warming advances,
the victims of water scarcity and desertification will be afflicted
anew. Those storm surges will destroy the most exposed parts of the
coastal mega-cities in which they will be clustered. In other words, for
the uprooted and desperate, there will be no escaping climate change.
As the latest IPCC report noted,
“Poor people living in urban informal settlements, of which there are
[already] about one billion worldwide, are particularly vulnerable to
weather and climate effects.”
