CNN has reported UN estimates that 'Climate apartheid' will see over 120 million people falling into poverty by 2030 as a result of the rapidly changing climate. Article here.

The full UN report stresses that as a result of the sheer rate of carbon emissions – 100 times faster than at any time in pre-industrial human history – global warming “is worse, much worse, than you think” (David Wallace Wells, The Uninhabitable Earth). And we’re not doing enough to combat it – the wholesale assault on the planet has continued even with the UN’s establishment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) over three decades ago in 1988 – in fact, the report estimates that more damage has been done in the years since the IPCC came into being than in the entirety of human history that came before it.

The last five years have seen record after record broken, and globally are the hottest since modern records began, and global carbon emissions – which had finally seemed to be levelling off for the 3 previous years – began to rise again in 2017. The consequences are already being seen and felt as temperatures soar, icecaps disappear, wildfires become more frequent, hurricanes and typhoons bring record winds and rainfall, and thousand-year floods become a regular occurrence – and energy consumption is set to rise by 28% percent by 2040 (on 2015 rates). 

Climate change is already affecting food production, and creating dire economic and social challenges. Globally, millions are battling malnutrition made worse by unseasonal droughts, and many must migrate to avoid starvation. Rising ocean temperatures are ravaging the marine ecosystems which provide food for hundreds of millions of people. Even 1.5°C of warming over the entire planet – near-universally accepted to be an unrealistic best-case scenario – will create extreme temperatures in many tropical and subtropical regions and inflict disease, food insecurity, loss of income and livelihoods on already-disadvantaged populations. Five hundred million people will be exposed to water stresses, 36 million could see crop yields plummet, and 4.5 billion people across the planet could suffer scorching heat-waves.

In all of these scenarios, those who are worst affected are the poorest, those who already have the least to lose.

What does this mean for Zambia, where in 2015, more than half of the population was living below the poverty line? What is our government doing, if anything, about the climate crisis? 

For all that, climate skepticism has become trendy among American celebrities, we are already in a climate crisis, and we need our leaders to take immediate and decisive action to address it before it is too late. Please join me in signing this petition to demand that action.