Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Shrinking glaciers and rising sea levels will pose new risks for human security.
The retreat of glaciers will threaten short-term flooding and long-term declines
in water availability across Asia, Latin America and parts of East Africa.
The HDR concludes starkly: 'For a large share of the world's people in developing
countries, climate change projections point to less secure livelihoods, greater
vulnerability to hunger and poverty, worsening social inequalities, and more
environmental degradation' (Watkins et al ., 2006: 159).
Issues relating to climate and gender justice are often tightly entwined and this is
not just because of women's relatively more limited access to resources and resulting
poverty compared with men. As Geraldine Terry (2009) writes, women's greater
vulnerability is often related to social and cultural norms, influencing gendered
divisions of labour and physical mobility, and the capability or opportunity to
participate in local decision-making processes. The relationship between human rights
and human development, corporate power and environmental justice, global poverty
and citizen action, suggest that responsible global citizenship is an inescapable element
of what may at first glance seem to be simply matters of personal consumer or moral
choice. As Naomi Klein (2000) shows in No Logo , the many emotionally highly
charged protests in the US against the big corporations are a direct result of people
recognizing the interconnectedness of the contemporary world. Research for her book
enabled Klein to see women making clothes for Gap in sweatshops in a free-trade
zone in the Philippines, where rules existed preventing smiling and talking, where
toilets were padlocked except for two fifteen-minute periods each day, where seam-
stresses had to urinate in plastic bags under their machines, where there was forced
overtime but no job security, and where wages barely reached subsistence level.
Indeed, environmental justice issues are simultaneously local and global - many low-
lying communities will be affected by climate change and sea-level rise, and a shortage
of fresh water is expected to be a massive problem by the middle of the twenty-first
century, as could be air pollution, toxic dumping and energy use. As a result, poor
countries have recently argued that rich countries have accrued a large 'ecological
debt' to the developing world for their over-appropriation of local and global resources
in past centuries, with some claiming that this debt is larger than the 'external debt'
- the financial debt which poor countries are currently having to service. A financial
estimate of the size of the - 'carbon debt' - a small part of the total ecological debt
- has been put at $1,500 billion. This is based on industrialized countries' historical
contribution to the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (ESRC, 2001).
Developed mainly in South America (Martinez-Alier, 2002), the concept of
ecological debt includes such factors as:
resource extraction during colonial periods;
export of natural resources under unequal terms of trade, which do not take
into account the social and environmental damage caused by their extraction;
the historical and current intellectual appropriation of ancestral knowledge;
the use of water, air, the best land and human energy to establish export crops,
putting at risk the food, health and security of local and national communities;
damage to the ozone layer and the appropriation of the carbon absorption
capacity of the planet; and
the export of toxic wastes and nuclear testing.
 
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