Climate Change and You (and Me and Everybody!)

Oxfam Action Corps has been in existence for over a year now and Oxfam America is celebrating the success of this volunteer-driven initiative in a big way with a new website: www.oxfamactioncorps.org. For those of you joining us for the first time, welcome!

Climate Change Affects People Too!
This year we are working hard to illuminate the effects of climate change on the world's most vulnerable communities living in poverty. The same communities that struggle to meet their daily needs are already facing the consequences of heightened extreme weather events, flooding, and draught that accompany the warming of the Earth. Think about this: People in the developing world are more than 20 times (!) as likely to be affected by climate-related disasters as people in places like the USA.

What Can Be Done
Oxfam America is asking that we stop hurting by reducing emissions, we start helping by providing money for communities in the developing world to adapt to the devastating effects of climate change, and that we develop solutions that are equitable.

Stop Hurting
Of course, we can all help by doing the little things like conserving energy and driving less. But things need to change on a much larger scale for us to even begin to deal with the pending disaster that looms ahead as climate changes.

This June, America’s Climate Security Act (aka the Lieberman-Warner bill – see s.2191) may come up for a vote in the Senate. The bill proposes a cap-and-trade system that would limit (cap) greenhouse gas emissions more progressively over time and create a carbon credit system (trade) whereby major greenhouse gas emitters (e.g. electric utility, transportation, and manufacturing industries) would have to have credits for all of their emissions. Ideally, it would be a market solution to lowering emissions and would also provide money (through auctioning the emissions credits) to help people adapt to higher energy prices here and the harmful effects of climate change everywhere. Check out what Oxfam America has to say about this bill as it looks today (with a substitution amendment introduced by California's Senator Boxer).

Start Helping
One thing that we all should have learned in kindergarten is that if you make a mess, it is your responsibility to clean it up. Well, we have certainly made a mess. More developed countries like the US have achieved a tremendously high standard of living thanks to economies that grow and thrive off of industries that are responsible for the vast majority of the greenhouse gas emissions that are causing climate change. As such, you might call it our moral obligation to help those who have not enjoyed a century of unfettered growth fed off of the burning of fossil fuels.

To help, Oxfam America believes that funding should be provided for adaptation projects in the developing world. That is, the people who will be hit first and worst by the impacts of climate change must find ways to live within this changing world or else they will die. It is that simple. Rising sea levels will bury whole cities in countries like Bangladesh. Melting glaciers will flood once-fertile valleys and leave them dry as a bone as rivers and aquifers dry up after the glaciers are gone. How will these people survive? By finding ways to adapt. And we can help.

Lieberman-Warner can provide money for adaptation projects through the funds that will be raised by the auctioning of emissions credits. Since it will take many billions of dollars to help these communities adapt (the UN estimates upwards of $80 billion annually), we still have a long way to go.

Let's do something about it!
Sign up for our email updates and volunteering opportunities!

Check out the Oxfam America website for more information!

Tell Congress to help the world's poor survive the climate crisis.

Tell the presidential candidates to make climate change and adaptation a priority.

More Climate Change and Adaptation News
Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Climate Change at Home
UNICEF UK, The tragic consequences of climate change for the world’s children
Vietnam News Agency, Climate Change Threatens Vietnam
Voice of America, Summit concludes climate change causes poverty
IRIN, Sudan: Of rats, stars and climate change
IRIN, Papua New Guinea: Climate change challenge to combat malaria