Climate Change: Cumbria and Kinshasa

Ask a child to ‘Sit still and yet believe that s/he is actually moving at breakneck speed and headed towards a brick wall with maximum impact’ and expect him/her to respond with ‘what, are you having a laugh?’.

Yet, for long now, our response to ongoing effects of climate change has been pretty similar. Yes, we have had the Francis of Asisi, Nobel Prize winners for the environment and numerous concerted actions at local and international levels to raise our awareness of the need to act rapidly to avert a possible inferno that won’t stop giving us a foretaste of its devastating sparks.

Those sparks, it would appear, have broken with (the wishful) tradition of being a distant threat that can be felt only if one took a long trip up to the North Pole. Sadly, the sparks have begun to hit home and knock on people’s doors. The examples are many and singling out the drenched parts of an already impoverished DRC’s capital Kinshasa (click here) or the swamped parts of England (click here) does not do justice to the individual stories of desperation in those two countries and elsewhere.

The pertinent issue in the above cases (DRC and England) however is the response by the authorities. While one is proactive with resources on the ground ready to get people back to normality, the other figures out whether already dilapidated roads and rudimentary homes can ever be brought back to their pre-flooding state of dysfunctionality. The differences confirm the belief that ‘while climate change is underwritten by scientific evidence, its effect on us is overwritten by the policy individual nations and the word at large adopt’. The ongoing Paris climate change conference may offer seriously binding targets to make the world ever greener but less democratic (or more dictatorial) regimes will continue to feel the effect of even little storms as a result of mismanagement and lack of adequate infrastructure.

The Paris conference and many other initiatives along the way may just spare us from the ‘apocalyptic annihilation of the human race’ but certain places could continue to be affected more than the others. Caught between science and politics (sometimes of the belly), it could be argued that how hard we get hit in future will certainly depend on how nations are committed to democratic principles that seek the common good above everything else. The question then is: could elections under threat in the DRC (and botched ones in other places) explain why Africa will continue to be hard hit by climate change regardless of what gets done globally?