Independent Online Edition > World Environment : app5
Two weeks ago, a group of British aid agencies and environmental groups, from Oxfam to Greenpeace, forcefully pointed out this awkward truth. Their report, Africa – Up In Smoke? insisted the issues of African poverty and climate change are inseparably linked, and the first cannot be solved without dealing with the second. It was a direct challenge to the simple Live8 theme, that if only the economic basis of Africa’s future can be sorted by a properly responsible rich world, the continent will come good. It will not, the report said, if we do not tackle the warming atmosphere.
Must read more about this. Increasingly feel that the environmental issue is in danger of being sidelined and completely forgotten, while in reality it is the only reality that matters, I think
Comments
One response to “I'd been wondering about this.”
I agree that all the talk of free-trade and debt cancellation etc puts the whole debate on a capitalist/economic agenda which rather masks the environmental effect. Having said that I think that “fixing” climate change overnight would aid African development but that economic and political problems provide a far greater obstacle to it’s future development (at least in the immediate term).
While I agree that the first world is the primary contributor to climate change and that it has, therefore, the responsibility to address the issue, it is worthwhile considering the spiralling use of fossil fuels in the Third World. The Third world wants to enjoy the economic and industrial prosperity of the First World and is going through the same “soot belching” industrial revolution that started all this over a hundred years ago . On climate change the developed nations have a duty to arrest their own environmental damage but the real challenge will be how to dissuade growing African economies from creating their own environmental catastrophe if they are to benefit from fair trade/ debt cancellation etc. (paternalistic as it sounds).