This week a major new report on climate change from Christian Aid hit headlines with its call to wealthy governments to take their share of the responsibility in helping developing countries adjust to the often devastating impact of climate change.

|PIC1|The release of the report, ‘The Climate of Poverty: Facts, Fears and Hope’, coincided with a major gathering on climate change which took place in Bonn this week.

The report called on the UK government to put together a ‘carbon budget’ to outline how the government will reduce emissions year by year by two thirds of 1990 levels by 2050.

It also urged the UK government to lead rich countries in putting forward new financial support to developing countries, as part of compensation for the damage inflicted on the environment, and to establish and fund programmes that would bring renewable energy to poor countries.

Christian Today met one of the authors of the hard-hitting report, Christian Aid’s John McGhie, to find out more about progress on climate change, the role of government and what churches and Christians can do to help.


CT: The climate change talks in Bonn this week were denounced as nothing more than a talk shop. Would you agree with that?

JM: Yes, they looked to be like they were a little bit of a shambles, that’s what it looks like from over here. Yeah, it was, how can it be anything else?

|QUOTE|CT: Do you think international level apparatus tends to get in the way of something that should be really quite simple?

JM: The simplest things often have the most complex implications and therefore the most complex answers and responses. And climate change is one of them. It is very, very obvious what to do about it, reduce the emissions now, now, from the very word go. But that is very hard to do because of the huge ramifications in terms of the industrialisation in the rich world, the developing world. We tend to say though, because we are a development agency, it is not new to look at climate change but new to take it in quite so mainstream way, this is a very major focus. So we say the time for shilly-shallying is gone. You can’t really mess about.

CT: What would you say to sceptics? Sceptics say there is no global warming so it’s a waste of talk and waste of investment.

JM: I would say the same thing to them as I would to someone who looked at a picture of the earth from a satellite and said the earth is flat. They’ve got to get real and they’ve got to wake up and understand what all the world scientists are pretty much saying. There are very few scientists who are not saying this. It is completely out of step with what everyone is saying. It is not because everyone says it that it has to be true. Sometimes everyone can get it wrong. But on this occasion it has been looked at and re-looked at and our science, Christian Aid’s science, the world’s science over a number of decades has come to this conclusion. I am absolutely convinced and I think you are a flat-earther if you don’t believe in the science of climate change.

It has already been demonstrated that it is 1 degree warmer over the last century. And you can argue about the finer points about which forecast is more likely, will it be five degrees or two degrees warmer but it is changing, the climate is changing.

|AD|And if you don’t believe the scientists then you do what I did and you talk to people on the ground, you talk to ‘real people’ if you like. I just come back from Malawi. And I tried to talk to particularly the older ones, the village elders, the ones who have been around for quite a while and I always ask the same question: is it different, is the weather different now? And to some extent you have to kind of think they are a bit like British farmers and they’re always complaining about the weather. That’s what people do.

But if you penetrate through that and you get to the reality of it, it is different. They don’t understand why, very often. Sometimes they do, but very often they don’t understand why. But they know the rains have changed. They used to be once a year and now they are twice and then it’s none.

Droughts and famines are not new unfortunately; they are not a new phenomenon. But the severity and the intensity and the increasing frequency of these things is new. In the time it’s taken for earth to get to where we are today it’s a blink of an eyelid. But the changes are rapid and massive and they are having a huge effect on poor people.

CT: You call on the government and rich countries in general in your report to take their part of the responsibility. Do you think the government is going to answer your calls and do you think it’s done enough in this sense?

JM: I think the UK government is pretty switched onto this issue. Certainly in terms of the rhetoric, they’re very good on it. And Margaret Beckett, the new foreign secretary, one of the first things she said was that she was going to make climate change a priority, which is fantastic. So they know about it.

But are they doing enough about it? Well, no they’re not. I mean no government is, in our view, no rich government that is. We don’t get into party politics, absolutely not. But we hear what they say, and we hear that they say they are behind schedule on cutting CO2 emissions. Now that’s serious. How can we then go to other countries, say America which hasn’t ratified the Kyoto protocol, which is a scandal. It seems like they’re the biggest emitter of toxins to the world but only one of the few countries that hasn’t ratified an international agreement to do anything about it so that is a scandal.

But how can we in Britain then go to them and say to them well how about it, when our emissions are climbing? So governments are not doing enough about it. Given the severity of the crisis we believe it to be, that we think it’s a clear and present danger to poor people across the globe.

Otherwise it’s just rhetoric. Otherwise it doesn’t matter. But actually because it affects people, people could die to put it crudely, and starve and drown as a result of climate change then this really matters, it becomes a moral imperative, in our view, to act.

We hope one of the things our report will do is to galvanise people, Christians and the wider community to think they can do something themselves. Churches have a very important role in this because they are finding great resonance over this issue. It is a very new issue for some people. But when they understand it then yes, of course, because it makes sense. And they understand instinctively.

A lot of people don’t understand instinctively the connection between what they do here in their own back yard literally and what happens on the other side of the world. I don’t think the government knows it, or the government knows it and they are shying away from it. But I think the people do and that’s an avenue for hope.

Because if people can start to cut back on their own excessive energy needs, and frankly when looked at in context of the developing world our energy needs are excessive, then not only do you actually help yourself by saving a few pounds on your bill, but you are really doing something because you are putting out less poison, less green house gases into the atmosphere. If we all do that and act in concert then it will have a profound effect and it will surely help change Government’s views as well.

So it is an issue that starts at home, it goes through up to government and then into the international plains and affects us all.

CT: So you are looking for the church to play a prominent role in this?

JM: Yes, the Archbishop of Canterbury made some very strong remarks about this and understandably so. When people in general sort of have scales fall off their eyes and see the extent of the problem you feel compelled to talk about it and act on it.

So yes I think the Church has an enormous role to play and I think they will be really important actually as one of the main focuses of this. And there are lots of things the churches can do.

Over the road from here, Solar Century is a private company and also has a charitable arm, Solar Aid which we used for a project in Malawi. Solar Aid told me they have had dozens if not hundreds of churches saying can we put a solar panel on our roof, can you help us, we are a church with not very much money but we would like to do something. And often they run up against planning regulations which is crazy to me. Of course in some cases, if you have to keep a fantastically Christian church you perhaps don’t want to spoil it with a panel. But we have to move with the times and perhaps we have to do this. But I use it as an example to show how churches have got a role to play and how they are already feeling out on their own without any prompting from anyone else which is great.

CT: One of the claims you make in your report is that renewable energy could open up a new era of prosperity and actually boost economic growth. What would you say to countries like India claimed poverty is its first priority, not global warming?

JM: We disagree with it, if they say that. I am not ashamed to say it because we believe that poverty and climate change are absolutely interlinked because climate change makes poverty worse. If you’re poor and your crops fail that’s worse. If you’ve got HIV/AIDS, you’re living with HIV, and your crops fail it’s worse. How can it not be interlinked? So we absolutely don’t see it like that at all, we see it in tandem.

I think what people are justifiably worried about is ‘so what are you saying, should we concentrate only on climate change and forget about poverty’? Absolutely not. That is not what we are saying. We are saying they go hand in hand.

That is on the negative side. On the positive side we see a real role of regeneration. Where do poor people live? Most of the world’s poor live in villages and communities and they don’t have any power, none at all, and when it gets dark it gets dark and that’s it. So what can you do? So if you introduce electric power, you can do it the inverted way and have the generator going or extend the electric grid and that is pretty much always fuelled by oil or coal which pumps out CO2 and makes things worse or you can go the green route which costs less.

It costs about the same to put in solar power for a community as it would do to extend an electric grid, which is an extraordinary thing. It is still expensive but it is not so much more expensive than electrification the old fashioned way.

So what does that give you if you are a poor community that suddenly has power? It means women don’t have to trek off and cut wood. It means women and men can attend school after they’ve been to work because they have light. It means they can have a fridge in the local clinic that keeps medicine. It means that local, tiny little businesses can start up, a barber shop here or drying seeds there. Jobs spring up which means less of the young people drift away from the village, families stay together, communities stay together. Slums aren’t so swollen. It’s very exciting. This is not the really big stuff but it’s very practical.

And you have to kind of see it to be amazed by it because I started off relatively sceptical. Yeah right, you’re telling me a couple of solar panels can change a community? Yes it can. Why? You’ve got a computer there. The uses are endless, the stuff we take for granted. They can charge mobile phones. You’ve got communications, health, education. You’ve got three of the building blocks of serious development. The good news is it’s small, it’s renewable, it’s sustainable. It’s the kind of end point which a lot of people have been hoping for. It’s not the only answer cos in poor countries, it’s one of the main points I need to make and stress because people can misunderstand our message, what we are not saying to Africa is stop developing. We are absolutely saying keep developing. It is us who have to lower our emissions whilst you develop and actually until you get renewable energy you’re going to have to use whatever you can and if that’s dirty fuel fine cos if we lower our emissions they can slightly raise theirs. With time it actually makes sense to go the renewable route.

CT: We have countries like India and China where the car-using population is growing and their attitude is very often one of ‘wait a minute you caused this problem over the decades and now these restrictions are coming to us’. How can we convince these countries to take measures against climate change?

JM: They have a point and I think what we have to say to those countries that are developing, there are two levels, the big ones, Brazil, India and China, who have reached the stage of development where they will soon overtake us probably. I think it is legitimate to say slow down. Look at how you are doing in so far...But actually we don’t need to say it because they are very aware of it. In China you can’t move for the smog. So people in China are extremely aware about what’s developing. India has a huge environmental movement, Brazil is one of the leading bio-mass producers.
So it’s not like this is brand new to them. So we have sympathy with the argument that they should be developing any way they can because who are we to draw up our draw bridge now we’ve made it there.

But what we are saying is if there is the opportunity to miss out that dirty level of development - and I’m talking about the poorer countries now which, in Africa particularly, haven’t reached that stage - then why go that route? A, it pollutes the planet and, B, it is incredibly expensive. Just to stand still in growth terms we will have to another pay 50 billion odd USD in the next 9 years just for the oil, and for that funnily enough you could put a solar panel on every roof.

The example people often use is mobile phones. You go to Africa 20 years ago, nobody’s got a mobile phone. Very few in Europe, but nobody in Africa. And there are some landlines for major communications but very few. But you go into the country side and forget it. You could drive a day or two without seeing a phone box.

Now a lot of people have mobile phones, and they’re pretty much anywhere in the village someone somewhere will have one. And they’ve done that without putting poles up all over the country and all the expense of that. They’ve skipped a generation and we think that makes sense. Skip a generation and go onto the next level. They can’t do it on their own cos it costs a lot to start off, not as expensive as people think given the equivalent. And that is where we think international organisations and national governments in the rich world can help and what is more I think it will help really help kick start the green economies in this country. And that is what everyone wants.