Immediate Climate Action Needed to Prevent Future Destruction

Typhoon Ketsana Highlights Vulnerability of Developing Countries
Immediate Climate Action Needed to Prevent Future Destruction

Nature will not wait for Copenhagen.

This situation was made more clear as Typhoon Ketsana left widespread flooding in many countries, unleashed unprecedented rainfall in Metro Manila and caught a lot of people unprepared both in the Philippines and Vietnam.

In the face of increasing frequency and strength of these weather events, the lack of proper infrastructure and planning in cities and towns of developing countries puts their urban population at risk. Developing countries lack the capacity to adapt to climate change induced rains and flooding. Their food security is threatened as their crops are destroyed by typhoons and their lives and homes destroyed by landslides, flooding and strong winds.

Climate change already aggravates other environmental problems that communities have to face as a result of globalization's ever increasing destruction of our ecology. The poor communities that have long been struggling economically are unable to cope with this threat.

The foot-dragging of the UNFCC in the intercessional meeting currently being held in Bangkok must stop. It is no longer a question that human activity has produced dangerous climate interference. The member countries of the UN, especially those from the developing countries, should not let the US and the G8 sabotage the negotiations for their benefit. Our goal should be to avoid catastrophic effects that could affect more than half of the world's population that are most vulnerable to climate change.

Immediate climate action is needed now. We should insist that emitter nations, such as the US and other industrialized countries, indemnify communities and nations like ours so that we may be able to adapt to extreme weather events and other disasters that may come in the future.

We should strive for a post-Kyoto climate agreement that will truly contain scientific and real solutions away from market based mechanisms to address global warming and climate change related concerns of the people of the world.

We should strengthen our people's movements and mobilize our communities not only to adapt to the effects of climate change but to reject the current world system that brought us here in the first place.

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