When it comes to global warming, discussions tend to get real abstract, real fast. How will climbing temperatures actually affect you? Well, it depends where you live—and how rich you are (or aren’t). According to a forthcoming study, climate change will disproportionately impact the world’s poor.
Jonathan Patz, a professor of public health and the environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is one of the study’s lead authors (and also an IPCC author). Patz says it’s time for those of us in the gas-guzzling-est of countries to come to terms with the painful (and inconvenient) truth: Our lifestyle is bad news for the developing world—and we’ve got an ethical problem on our hands. In a UW-Madison press release, Patz says:
If energy demand drives up the price of corn, for example, this can inflict undue burden on poor or malnourished populations or shift agricultural areas away from other traditional food crops.
And then there are the health issues:
There are many serious diseases that are sensitive to climate, and as earth’s climate changes, so too can the range and transmission of such diseases….Many of these climate-sensitive diseases, such as malaria, malnutrition, and diarrhea, affect children.
This isn’t the first time someone has pointed out the unfairness of climate change. Among others, Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier has noted that her people’s carbon output is a tiny fraction of the U.S.’s, yet global warming is already threatening the Inuit way of life. The IPCC has also predicted that poor people—particularly those in Africa—will be hardest hit by climate change.
To read the study, you’ll have to wait till next week, when it will be published in the journal EcoHealth, but you can already check out these cool maps—one shows countries’ relative carbon outputs, while the other shows their vulnerability to the effects of climate change.
