We visited the entrance to Parliament inside Westminster tube station this morning to speak about our extreme weather record breaking year. Climate change is making extreme weather events more likely and this has been seen in the global weirding of our weather recently. Here in the UK we have experienced the wettest April and June and the coldest spring, while globally May was the hottest month on record and the 28th of August saw the lowest ever recording of Arctic ice levels. Almost 80% of agricultural land in the US is facing drought at the moment and it’s causing world food prices to spike, endangering the world’s poorest people and making more famines and food riots more likely to occur. Forest fires have been burning in the US, France, Greece, Italy, Croatia and Spain – some forest first fires have been burning for over three months while seven million people are homeless due to flooding in Assam and Bangladesh.
To highlight the weird weather we’re experiencing and our government’s lack of action to tackle climate change, we dressed up in our most incongruous items of clothing this morning and headed to Parliament. We wore summer shorts with winter hats or warm scarf’s with swimming costumes to show how unpredictable our weather is becoming. But climate change and extreme weather events are creating bigger problems than just difficult fashion choices. Climate change is pushing up world food prices and it’s making life almost impossible for the poorest people in the world who spend 75% of their income on food. Oxfam has published a new report called Extreme Weather, Extreme Prices explaining the link between climate change, extreme weather and the impacts of food prices on people in the developing world. The Guardian have compiled these terrifying facts from the report –
• Even under a conservative scenario another US drought in 2030 could raise the price of maize by as much as 140% over and above the average price of food in 2030, which is already likely to be double today’s prices.
• Drought and flooding in southern Africa could increase the consumer price of maize and other coarse grains by as much as 120%. Price spikes of this magnitude today would mean the cost of a 25kg bag of corn meal – a staple which feeds poor families across Africa for about two weeks – would rocket from around $18 to $40.
• A nationwide drought in India and extensive flooding across south-east Asia could see the world market price of rice increase by 22%. This could lead to domestic spikes of up to 43% on top of longer term price rises in rice importing countries of such as Nigeria, Africa’s most populous country.
• Climate shocks in sub-Saharan Africa are likely to have an increasingly dramatic impact in 2030 as 95% of grains such as maize, millet and sorghum that are consumed in sub-Saharan Africa are expected to come from the region itself.
You can see some extraordinary photos of recent extreme weather from around the globe on the National Geographic website.
If you would love to get involved in acting against climate change you can get in touch with us at [email protected]
Tags: arctic ice, Climate Change, climate rush, drought, extreme weather, food prices, natural disasters, oxfam