Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In many Southern nations, the need to mitigate immediate and extreme
climate impacts on the ground compromises poverty alleviation and
development projects. For instance, the need for infrastructure repair
after storms and hurricanes can jeopardize the fi nancial ability of munici-
palities to build new roads or bridges in poor areas that need to be better
connected to the city. Addressing fl ooding in slums and repairing damaged
buildings and houses requires fi nancial resources that could be put
toward new housing developments. Therefore, in order to be adequately
tackled, climate change must be confronted “in an integral way with the
problems of poverty and exclusion in the South and over-consumption
of fuel dependence in the North” (Pettit 2004, 105).
In terms of vulnerability to climatic changes, countries in the weakest
economic position are often most vulnerable to climate impacts and sus-
ceptible to damages and disasters, especially when they are faced with
multiple stresses (IPCC 2007a). For example, nations facing rising oceans
and drought such as Mozambique and Honduras have made minimal
contributions to emissions and have limited resources to protect their
populations, natural resource base, and infrastructure (Huq et al. 2007;
Parks and Roberts 2006; Adger et al. 2006). Furthermore, developing
countries are not equipped with the resilient risk-management capacity to
mitigate extreme weather impacts, nor with the fi nancial resources to adapt
to and recover from climate effects. Thus, ultimately, addressing environ-
mental inequities will require targeting the imbalances between the ability
of rich and poor nations to cope with climate impacts (Yohe 2000).
Local Views on Climate Inequities
A closer look at nations within the global South reveals that the remote
emission of greenhouse gases and the political economy of production
and consumption have signifi cant impacts on individuals, communities,
and policy goals and plans. While impacts play out at these different
scales, climate injustices often exacerbate existing local inequities, as
marginalized individuals, vulnerable communities, and policies of livabil-
ity and equity are being sacrifi ced, and long-term poverty alleviation and
sustainability goals become marginalized by the need to attend to imme-
diate priorities.
At the individual scale, within developing countries and cities in par-
ticular, spatial injustices related to climate change manifest themselves
through the acute vulnerability of the urban poor to environmental
hazards and extreme weather events in comparison with richer and
dominant groups. Their vulnerability to extreme events is derived from
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