Adaptation to climate change, a joint action
Individual will alone is not enough to improve life quality, but also to have the capacity to involve the community, empower it and strengthen it, with the search for support from other forces and organizations in order to move forward. Closely linked to this action is the ability to adapt to climate change, identifying the conditions and processes that allowed this activation, generating actions that allow the mitigation of the damage already done by human beings.
On these topics, points of view of experts on environmental issues were shared in the chapter called Poverty, Adaptability, and Climate Change, within the Cerrito Forum 2019, focusing on experiences and actions to end poverty, linked to sustainable solutions that reduce the impact of our actions.
It is understood that climate change is a global challenge that knows no borders and that in order to fight it, requires coordinated work by all the active agents that make up each country and thus, obtain impact and positive results thanks to the actions taken.
For Gustavo Nagy, Associate Professor of Environmental Sciences, Universidad de la República (Uruguay), the emissions of greenhouse gases produced throughout the history of humanity are causing global warming, and this problem has been accelerating for the past four years with catastrophic effects, such as the sea-level behavior.
Yan Speranza, Executive Director of the Moisés Bertoni Foundation, said that there is a gap between what science says and the actions we do:
“The impact is significant due to vulnerability. That is why it would be interesting to implement the Poverty Stoplight — Fundación Paraguaya’s program- not only to measure the level of poverty for its later elimination, but also to know how families are affected by each rain, for example. It happens to all of us, but climate changes are only suffered by some.”
Regarding this point, Melania Guerra, Oceanographer and Science Diplomacy Consultant, with her data she alarmed that: “99% of deaths due to climate change occur in developing countries, while 79% of carbon emissions come from developed countries.”
Nagy indicated that an agreement has to be made between community members, state agents and scientific experts to know which effort is the most viable and sustainable, in relation to the adaptation to climate change, because the socio-economic and cultural realities of nations cannot be ignored, along with the order of their priorities as a nation, where a thorough and honest analysis of the costs and benefits must be carried out, so that communities can have a clear understanding about whether or not to apply such a support mechanism. “Adaptation is a collective process and is done by the community. All the extreme events and gradual changes that are generated, have to be analyzed, because of the cost in the development. This climatic variability becomes social expenditure and from the point of view of poverty, it is a poverty generator” he said.
As recommendations, Guerra insisted on the gradual changes from the houses:
“we have to consider what we eat, also how we move, what kind of transportation we use daily in order to move; how and in what to invest; how we vote at the local and national level and the essential, we have to talk about climate change, because we are all affected by it,” he concluded.
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