Can the World Save Lives and Combat Climate Change?

[xchrom]

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=combining-development-humanitarian-aid-and-climate-change-responses


WATER FILTER: An innovative effort in western Kenya is attempting to provide clean water as well as reductions in the emissions of greenhouse gases.
Image: Courtesy of Vestergaard Frandsen

Environmental, humanitarian and economic challenges do not exist in isolation, but that is how the world most often deals with them. To take just one example: one of the key challenges facing cities around the globe in the 21st century is flooding. Flooding is determined by environmental factors, from climate change to overcrowding of floodplains with habitation. Flooding is also often a humanitarian disaster when it strikes and can be an aftereffect of big development projects, like hydroelectric dams.

Or take the metals in a cell phone. As Judith Rodin, president of the philanthropic Rockefeller Foundation, noted at her organization's event about "resilient livelihoods" on September 25, tungsten is the "metal that puts the buzz in your cell phone." Mining that tungsten is an economic development opportunity but also too often creates a humanitarian crisis when such economically valuable minerals become a source of conflict—as has been the case in the eastern Congo. At the same time, the mining practices used to extract such metals can be more or less bad for the environment and human health.

The U.N. buzz phrase of the last decade—"sustainable development"—is slowly morphing into a new sustainable buzzword for the development and humanitarian communities: resilience. Resilience means, at its core, an ability to bounce back from stress in a healthy way, Rodin said. But, as development expert Edward Carr of the University of South Carolina rightly notes, resilience of what, to what? Enabling the poor to be resilient in the face of challenges like climate change may require a fundamental rethinking of the methods used to address both poverty and global warming.

[AverageJoe90]

1. Climate change can be combatted, but how the next 100 years will go really DOES depend on....

What exactly is done and how soon.....and one thing that is a sure fact is, the longer it takes, the harder it will be for us, and Nature, to mitigate the damage.

Unfortunately, the realistic pictures aren't always the optimistic ones: how about ~4*C by 2100? And this is a scenario in which the radical changes to greenhouse emissions, and switches to alternative fuels, etc. are made within about 15-25 years, and that also takes plausible feedback scenarios into account(but not the possible sequestering and elimination of excess Co2).

It's not going to be the total end of the world, of course; humanity isn't going to go extinct or Earth turn into Venus II, or whatever(despite the fears, and wishes in some cases, of the Chicken Littles amongst us); but it's not going to be paradise, either, especially not for middle latitudes and people living in the Arctic regions of the world, especially boreal Siberia and far northern Canada.

At least we can be thankful for those who continue to work towards making the world a slightly better place, even if thru only small efforts.