Although it hasn’t been widely publicised where I live, I’ve been informed that the American government is trying to convince India to adopt policies that will decrease their (India’s) carbon emissions.

A story in a Time of 2005 talked about something the likes of, “India and China hold the future in their hands”. The article dealt specifically with the carbon footprints of these industrial nations.

Where I come in is that India’s argument for declining to make an agreement is that it will negatively affect their poor – and one thing that India has a-plenty of is poverty.

At this stage my mind is pathology-oriented (blame varsity) and for the life of me I struggled to bring the concepts of greening and starving together.

All I could think of was that initiating these endeavours would obviously cost money, which could possibly take much-needed money from India’s budget, thus depleting the resources available for helping the poor.

In response to India’s viewpoint, however, there is an interesting opposition.

Turns out climate change isn’t just something the comfortably rich get to fight against for a lack of hardships in their lives.

TURNS OUT that climate change hits the poorest, the hardest.

But then, we’ve known that in the back of our minds all along, haven’t we?

In severely underdeveloped countries it’s not really a matter of water or veggies being scarce and thus having to fork out a bit more to get them. It’s a matter of: if they’re scarce, you might not actually GET THEM. At ALL.

So it kind of becomes a problem when people labour and forage for longer hours, yet come home with less water and food.

Think: hungry.

Think: Kwashiorkor.

Think dry skin spanning over bony limbs and swollen tummies.

 

These are times when children are kept from school (if they even have that luxury) to help with the search for food. And no education very often equals a continued cycle of poverty.

These are times of floods and droughts and all sorts of climate disasters, proven to be a direct effect of climate change.

So I would have to argue that the benefits of implementing these strategies are distinctly more far-reaching than the costs thereof.

Many believe that climate change and all its dangers don’t exist, and I don’t have a thesis to disprove that – but would you rather fight a good fight only to find out there was no danger, or not fight the fight only to discover that the dangers were real all along?

I understand that the conditions we experience now are not necessarily reversible... but reducing emissions now might at least decrease further effects (the old proverb does go, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago... the second best time is now”).

So my point is this: you cannot say you are passionate about alleviating poverty and at the same time neglect the effects of climate change on the poor...