Climate Change and Community Development
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), established by the United Nations World Meterological Organization and UNEP to assess scientific, technical and socio- economic information relevant for the understanding of climate change, recently released its 4th Assessment Report. The report describes the impact of global warming on human populations and the natural systems that support life. Projecting a probable global increase in temperature between 3.2-7.2 degrees Fahrenheit this century and a likely sea level rise of 11"-16", the report calls for immediate action to prevent further damage. The authors emphasize that even if emissions of carbon dioxide and the other greenhouse gasses that cause global warming were to be significantly reduced immediately, our societies still need to prepare for major shocks as a shifting climate affects ecosystems, agriculture and sea levels.
Climate change threatens the world's poor on a massive scale. Billions of the most vulnerable will face water shortages. Changes to agricultural cycles will threaten food security across entire regions. Disease vectors, benefiting from global warming, will cover wider areas further impacting health of humans, their crops and livestock. Rising sea levels will displace coastal communities in both rural and heavily urbanized environments. Yet these are only the primary impacts. Massive migrations and water shortages will lead to social tensions that will likely erupt into conflict from community to national scales as 300 million people, displaced by rising sea levels, seek new land and places to live in an ever more crowded world.
The development community
It is clear that the impacts of environmental change will roll back many years of development advances and that unless we are proactive, underserved communities will have no voice at the table on policy issues that will affect them the most. We run the risk that climate change will undermine decades of hard work in poverty alleviation, leaving developing countries poorer, less healthy and more vulnerable than ever before.
At the same time many development agencies are facing the dilemma of balancing addressing these critical environment-related issues (many of which are anticipated rather than current) against current everyday priorities. Differences in climate change projection models further complicate the picture and make it difficult to plan for the future. Against such an overwhelming and depressing picture, what can development agencies do to play their part in helping the communities we work with adapt to and potentially even benefit from climate change?
Mercy Corps, a relief and development agency working in transitional environments, is currently developing a comprehensive and practical strategy to ameliorate both the direct threat and secondary effects of climate change. The strategy involves a two-pronged approach: 1) identifying program methodologies that will enable communities to engage in climate-change mitigation activities in ways that facilitate their own social and economic development, and 2) working with communities on adaptation strategies that will enhance their resiliency and ability to prepare for some of the predicted climate-related changes.
As we ramp up our effort to deal with climate change, another challenge is gathering pace. Over the next ten years, one billion young people will be reaching working age, competing for what the International Labor Organization estimates to be at most three hundred million jobs. Youth unemployment is not only a waste of productive resources; it is a risk factor in radicalism, crime, and conflict. The nexus of these threats compounds issues of inequality and stability that further threaten global security.
A vision of climate change opportunity
While these twin challenges, climate change and youth unemployment, are daunting they also represent an opportunity: development of new markets and training to create job opportunities in climate-friendly activities including community-level alternative energy promotion, carbon capture in agro-forests, energy and water savings.
The winning strategy will create businesses that help address climate change while reducing unemployment and resource-based conflict potential, working with communities to foster economic opportunity in adapting and mitigating climate change causes and impacts. This response should result in small and medium enterprise business models generating profits from sustainable resource use while generating youth employment.
We in the relief and development community need to provide a lens for focusing global efforts underway in more traditional programming in economic development, agribusiness and natural resource management. We need to create new directions for partnerships between the private sector, communities and development agencies. This is a wonderful opportunity to engage new partners, particularly from the corporate sector. Private and public institutions, for-profits and non-profits, across the globe are all actively grappling with current and anticipated implications of climate change. Forward-thinking businesses including corporations, banks, venture capital firms, and alternative energy manufacturers are looking toward the business opportunities that climate change presents. From fuel efficient stoves to solar kits that provide lighting at a cost that is cheaper than kerosene, the poorer sections of global society represent a vast market for new technologies. It is clear that there are huge opportunities for collaboration, cooperation and influence, building public/private/non profit relationships in innovative ways. In parallel with these efforts, NGOs need to integrate such initiatives with a variety of government agencies including those responding to climate change, economic development and foreign direct investment.
The bottleneck for many forward-thinking private sector organizations is market access. What development agencies bring to the table is the ability to mobilize communities and provide market access to consumers for new and useful products that replace climate-damaging and ultimately more expensive old technologies. By joining efforts, the public/private/non-profit sectors could create a market mechanism that is sustained by profit, while mitigating the causes and effects of climate change.
Implementation
As an agency, Mercy Corps is commencing work with corporate partners to identify demand-driven business opportunities for youth in countries of mutual interest. The opportunities mapped out will respond to the causes and impact of climate change in each country, including analyzing job opportunities in construction, marketing and sales of fuel efficient wood burning stoves; tree farming for construction materials; mini-hydro plants for community power in rural areas; solar technologies that switch fuel use from kerosene to clean energy. Whereas these technologies are often used in development programs, their footprint is usually small. The intent now is to harness the marketing power and profit motive from manufacturers and investment institutions, providing scale and large footprints for technologies that benefit the poor, create jobs and profits at multiple levels of national and regional economies through activities mitigating and adapting to climate change.
We should not be under the illusion that these activities will provide the scale to prevent or fully adapt to global warming. As the IPCC and many others make clear, industrialized and developing nations must reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and tropical deforestation must stop. However, for their part, the development community can take positive steps to help shield the most vulnerable from the worst shocks of climate through new partnerships that are fully in line with humanitarian mandates and that enable under-developed communities to participate in solutions that satisfy their own interests.