War dominates agenda but we must not forget climate change is our common enemy

Caroline O'Doherty

A protest banner is displayed during the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26), in Glasgow, Scotland, last November. Photo: Reuters/Yves Herman

February 28 2022 02:20 PM

THERE is no good time to deliver bad news but when it comes to getting the word out on the climate crisis, the cue cards always seem sabotaged.

The last major report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came in August after 18 months of Covid, when countries were either too exhausted from the pandemic or too exhilarated from the easing of lockdown to want to pay much attention to messages about future planetary destruction.

Now something else is hogging the limelight.

War in Europe is the ultimate excuse for saying “not now please” to those brandishing a 3,675-page climate-change report.

But this latest report lays bare how incredibly vulnerable billions of the world’s people are to a planet under stress.

Those vulnerabilities are eerily similar whether the cause of the stress is climate change or war.

Loss of land and homes, destruction of infrastructure, disruption to transport, communications, power systems, water supplies and food production.

Human health, physical and mental, is under sustained pressure and people are on the move, involuntarily migrating in search of somewhere that offers them safety and an opportunity to support themselves and their families.

Nature and ecosystems are under attack – burned, polluted and neglected.

Of course there is another common thread running between the two issues fighting for attention today.

Fossil fuels have built economies and destroyed ecosystems. They have gifted fortunes to an elite few and disinherited billions of their right to a safe environment.

Oil and gas have much to do with the unhealthy political alliances, distrust and discord that dominates much of international relations.

They are often lurking somewhere when those relations break down.

Weaning ourselves off them is not only essential to get control over global temperature rise and the impacts of climate change, but it would also help take the heat out of geopolitical wrangles.

We have made them precious resources but others are truly priceless – fresh water and fertile soil among them.

Many analysts have attributed conflicts, across Africa in particular, to resource wars fuelled by climate change.

The IPCC says it is not causing conflicts yet – that other socio-economic difficulties are more likely culprits – but that it exacerbates violence and division.

As events in Ukraine show, the world has quite enough of that without baiting a common enemy in climate change.