Appeal to world leaders ahead of climate talks

Oxfam release

The human and financial costs of climate change are spiralling out of control, Oxfam warns, as hundreds of thousands of people in London and around the world prepare to march for action. The march takes place before world leaders meet to discuss climate change for the first time in five years. Failure to act in those years means world leaders now have to play catch-up.
 
Extreme weather like Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, Hurricane Sandy in the United States and the drought in East Africa have cost the world half a trillion dollars ($490 billion or £300 billion) in those five years. Right now, 1.8 million people are stranded by flooding caused by monsoon rains earlier this month in Pakistan, and 249 people have been killed.
 
Since 2009, more than 650 million people have been affected and more than 112,000 homes have been lost from disasters like droughts, floods and storms. Extreme weather has cost the world three times more than for the whole of the 1970s.
 
World leaders are due to meet again next Tuesday (23) in New York after the UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon called for a Climate Summit to breathe new life into global climate action.
 
Mark Goldring, Oxfam’s Chief Executive, said: “Climate change is happening now, claiming lives and forcing people into a life of hunger. Today people all round the world will be showing how they expect world leaders to catch up with the science and listen to their calls to act now. The cost of delay is clear – and will only get worse the longer they sit and wait.”
 
The People’s Climate March in London today (Sunday) will be among 2,000 events in 150 countries calling for climate action at the Ban Ki-moon Climate Summit. The march has celebrity backing and people affected by the floods in the UK earlier this year will be among those attending. Last winter, more than 5,000 properties and thousands of hectares of farmland across England and Wales were flooded after the wettest winter since records began 238 years ago.
 
A lack of ambition and action from world leaders since the UN climate talks in Copenhagen five years ago means that we are on course to warm by almost 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century, which will guarantee wide-spread climate destruction and hunger. There are huge shortfalls in the promised climate funding to help poor people who are hit hardest by climate change to protect themselves and develop in a low-carbon way. 
 
Announcements at the summit from the private sector are expected to be a mixture of green wash and steps in the right direction. Even so, they cannot match the giant strides needed that only world leaders can make.  Despite this, the 120 leaders attending are expected to bring little to the table.
 
Oxfam is calling for David

 Cameron, who is attending the Summit, to lead the way in boosting climate finance by pledging the UK’s fair share to the Green Climate Fund of at least $1 billion (£610 million), and pushing for a more ambitious EU climate and energy package that is in line with what the UK and the EU need to do to avoid global warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius. Leaders must all work towards submitting ambitious initial pledges by next Spring for the UN climate talks in Paris at the end of next year. These should be in line with their fair share of the global effort needed to put the world back on track to avoiding runaway climate change.
 
The private sector can help by pressing governments for better regulation, such as energy efficiency standards, more investment in renewables, cuts in fossil fuel subsidies and more climate finance. They must also cut their own emissions in line with the science and set targets to phase out fossil fuel emissions from their operations.
 
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For a copy Oxfam’s new report, The Summit that Snoozed? Click http://oxf.am/zna
 
Notes to editors:

According to the EM-DAT database, the total damage costs for 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and part of 2014 amount to $491, 827, 336,000 in 2013 constant prices. The whole of the 1970s cost approximately $160 billion in 2013 constant prices. The data is sourced from the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) at Louvain University (http://www.emdat.be), classifying the following disasters as climate-related: droughts, extreme temperatures, wildfires, storms, floods, mass movements (wet).  All total costs were converted from current to constant 2013 prices using data fromhttp://oregonstate.edu/cla/polisci/download-conversion-factors.  Costs have increased since the 1970s due to more extreme weather, improvements in the reporting of weather disasters and increases in the number of people and the value of assets exposed to extreme weather.
 
When leaders met in Copenhagen in 2009, they agreed to cut emissions but not by enough to avoid global warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius. Countries have done nothing to increase ambition since, despite plummeting costs of renewable energy. Some like Canada and Japan have backed away from their pledges altogether. Leaders also agreed to provide $30 billion (£18 billion) between 2010 and 2012, and then increase that so developing countries had $100 billion (£61 billion) a year by 2020 to reduce emissions and adapt as far as possible to climate change. This has been a fail too. Very few countries have committed to provide the increase in funds they should have in the next few years. Oxfam estimates that, at best, a total of between $16 (£9.8 billion) and $17 billion (£10.4 billion) is flowing per year, but the figure is closer to $8 or 9 billion (£4.9 or £5.5 billion) when creative accounting is taken into account. The Green Climate Fund, set up to channel these funds, has so far only had $1.1 billion (£670 million) pledged of the $15 billion (£9.2 billion) that Oxfam says is needed to get it up and running. 

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