130 Oxfam Briefing Paper 6 July 2009
Suffering the Science
Climate change, people, and poverty
A water-logged Bangladeshi woman in search of drinking water after Cyclone Aila hit Gabura, Satkhira in Bangladesh on 26 May 2009. The
flooding was caused by storm surge and breached embankments as a result of the cyclone. This type of surge has almost certainly been made
worse by sea-level rise. ©Abir Abdullah/Oxfam
Climate change is damaging people’s lives today. Even if world
leaders agree the strictest possible curbs on greenhouse gas
(GHG) emissions, the prospects are very bleak for hundreds of
millions of people, most of them among the world’s poorest. This
paper puts the dramatic stories of some of those people alongside
the latest science on the impacts of climate change on humans.
Together they explain why climate change is fundamentally a
development crisis. The world must act immediately and
decisively to address this, the greatest peril to humanity this
century.
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Foreword
Two years ago, thousands of scientists came together in the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We agreed that
the climate system was warming unequivocally, and that if current
rates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from human activity
continue, the world would see further warming, accompanied by more
extreme weather and sea-level rise, and risks of abrupt and irreversible
change.
Earlier this spring, scientists meeting in Copenhagen reiterated and
updated the evidence for climate change. We concluded that the
scientific evidence has now become overwhelming and that human
activities, especially the combustion of fossil fuels, are influencing the
climate in ways that threaten the well-being and continued
development of human society.
We reported that recent observations show that GHG emissions are at
the higher end of those considered by the IPCC. Some of the most
worrying new science focuses on the lik