Remarks by Bekele Geleta, Secretary General, at the side event organised by the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) during the 14th Conference of Parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change, in Poznan
In 1992, when world leaders signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, aid organizations were not anticipated to come to Poznan in 2008.
The climate problem was expected to have been solved. Our presence here today as a united force of humanitarian and development agencies shows, unfortunately, that the world, as a whole, has failed to avoid climate change becoming a crisis.
The joint submission from the IASC and ISDR to the UNFCC says: “in the coming decades, climate change is expected to exacerbate the risks of disasters, not only from more frequent and intense hazard events but also though greater vulnerability to the existing hazards”.
However, that future is with us already.
I have the privilege of heading the world’s largest humanitarian and development assistance network with a presence in myriad communities up and down 186 countries. Our tens of millions of Red Cross Red Crescent members and volunteers bear daily witness to the disastrous impacts of climate change.
We see the pain of those who lose their loved ones and their hard-earned assets and livelihoods, and the anxiety of those forced to leave their homes for an uncertain place and future. Within the last month, we have been called upon to respond to weather related disasters in Brazil, Vietnam, Yemen, Ethiopia and other countries.
Right now, we are scrambling to help the millions of hungry in the Horn of Africa in the latest of the repeated crises there.
Of course, we are getting better and better at responding to disasters because, unfortunately, “practice makes perfect”. And necessity will, no doubt, continue to drive further improvements and expansion in disaster management through the many initiatives underway to strengthen hazard mapping, contingency planning, early warning, and quicker recovery.
However, it would be even smarter to prevent or reduce the chances of hazards turning into disasters.
This is possible for a significant proportion of the 9 out of 10 disasters nowadays that are climate-related. Disaster risk reduction and risk management is not just the first line of defence against the impacts of climate change. It is also the first line of positive adaptation to the climate change that is already with us.
This is fundamentally a task for long-term development with much greater precision need in strategies to integrate climate adaptation measures into poverty and vulnerability reduction. In turn, this means that traditional national development strategies must be refined to incorporate climate adaptation objectives, and expanded with the provision of additional resources.
It is encouraging to see the innovative practices that are emerging as new knowledge and technologies are pressed into the service of risk reduction. In case there are still some sceptics out there, they can be pointed towards many examples to show that risk reduction really does work, in practice, to save lives and protect livelihoods.
A year ago a journalist took the plane from Nairobi to Maputo. He had just covered the post election unrest in Kenya and thought he was on his way to the next African crisis: the floods in Mozambique.
And yes, there were floods, but no, there was no crisis. The more frequent and sometimes excessive rains in Mozambique fit the pattern that climate change scientists predict for this country and region. Mozambique heeded these warnings and invested in early warning and disaster risk reduction measures and actions. So last January they could avoid a crisis and avoided bringing another disaster story in the headlines of the media. As a ‘reward’ their success story was not told. The journalist took the next plane home.
During this week, I hope that we will be allowed to share our experiences from successful and well-coordinated partnerships in disaster risk management. However, meaningful scale-up in disaster risk reduction efforts will still elude us. Perhaps, because they cost a great deal.
It is comforting to know that governments can immediately find trillions of dollars to save financial markets from meltdown. Can we find the smaller sums that are needed over a much longer time period - to save the world itself from melting?
Just as some governments are now thinking of establishing binding legal bases for national greenhouse gas emission targets, perhaps they could do the same for investment in risk reduction.
For example, and building on the initiative of pioneering nations, could we not propose that governments dedicate the equivalent of at least 20% (the right benchmark level could be debated) of the funds spent in disaster response management to investment in risk reduction and risk sharing mechanisms?
Their citizens may be well- inclined to support or demand this when they realize that such investment would be highly cost effective.
Available studies show that $1 invested in hazard risk management can reduce from $3 to $10 in disaster losses.
In focusing my remarks on the financing of disaster risk reduction as part of climate change adaptation, humanitarian considerations are only a starting point.
Let us not forget the obvious point that climate change has to be tackled, ultimately, through mitigation i.e. by decreasing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.
As the experience of these long running climate change negotiations have shown, success will require global cooperation on an unprecedented scale. This is much more likely to happen if cooperation arrangements – such as the one we hope will be agreed in Copenhagen next year – are based on the notion of fairness.
This means acknowledging more openly that the human consequences of dangerous climate change are not equally distributed. What is “dangerous” and for whom is determined by differences in factors such as localised climate effects, social and economic coping capacities, and public policy choices.
Overall, it is the poor that suffer most because they live in the most environmentally stressed circumstances and have the least resilience to handle climatic shocks.
Investing in climate adaptation including risk reduction - with priority on the most poor and vulnerable communities - is a demonstration of the practical commitment that is necessary to achieve the positive attitudes and mindsets that must underpin any workable agreement on climate change.
To conclude: let us remind ourselves that climate change is the result of individual human actions everywhere though, of course, those who have enjoyed the fruits of energy-dense development must acknowledge their greater historic responsibility in this regard.
In any case, the disastrous effects of climate change affect all of us – rich or poor – though, as always, it is the poor that are hurt most. But we are where we are now – in the same fragile life raft. And there is no safe harbor to be found except through uniting - rich and poor - in a common endeavour of unprecedented magnitude.
In short, the message we bring to the table here in Poznan is that despite all the technologies, financial incentives, sanctions and international agreements that are undoubtedly needed and will certainly be useful tools, it is only when the billions of human “doings” that contribute to climate change are transformed into billions of positive human actions for change – here, there, and everywhere - that we will really solve this most significant challenge of our age.
In the Red Cross Red Crescent, we call this “mobilizing the power of humanity”. In the face of climate change, we must commit to do this now, and in the years ahead, on a scale that the world has never seen before.