Madagascar is wake-up call to climate crisis
ROME – The drought-stricken island nation of Madagascar is a ’wake up call” to what the world can expect in coming years due to climate change, the head of the United Nations’ food aid agency said Tuesday.
David Beasley, executive director of the World Food Program, told The Associated Press in an interview that what’s happening in the south of the Indian Ocean country is “the beginning of what we can expect” to see as the effects of global warming become more pronounced.
“Madagascar was heartbreaking,” Beasley said, referring to his recent visit there. “It’s just desperate,” with people reduced to selling their household pots and pans to try to buy food, he said.
Some 38 million people worldwide were displaced last year because of climate change, leaving them vulnerable to hunger, according to Beasley. A worst-case scenario could an see that number soar to 216 million people displaced due to climate change by 2050.
That’s the year many industrialized nations – but not China, Russia or India – have set as their target for achieving carbon neutrality, meaning reducing greenhouse gas emissions to the point where they can be absorbed and effectively add zero to the atmosphere.
When Beasley, a former South Carolina governor, took the World Food Program helm in 2017, the top reason for people being on the brink of starvation was man-made conflict, followed by climate change, he said.
But since then, climate change has been eclipsing conflicts as the bigger driver in displacing people and leaving them not knowing where their next meal will come from. Last year, about 38 million, he said, were displaced “strictly because of climate shocks, climate change,” Beasley said.
“I would like to think this is the worst-case scenario – 216 million people by 2050 that will be migrating or displaced because of climate change,” he said.
According to updated WFP figures released Tuesday, close to 30,000 people on Madagascar will be one step away from famine by the end of the year, and some 1.1 million already suffer from severe hunger. The island is struggling with exceptionally warm temperatures, drought and sandstorms.
Crops have wilted, and