Forfatter:
Kristin Rødland Buick
Climate Refugee, Prisoner of Poverty
Three weeks ago I jumped from rock to rock and dangled on wooden boards to get to my mate Galy’s house in Dakar. In the rainy season, the poorest districts of Senegal’s capital town turn into a sort of Venice; both main roads and small streets get filled with water. Yet the canals in the Pekine neighbourhood are anything but romantic. The neighbourhood smells of sewage and the stagnant water is home to bacterial diseases such as cholera and blood-sucking parasites.
The rainy season in Senegal is not a new phenomenon. But the downpour in Dakar in September this year, matches the ranks of other extreme weather conditions we’ve seen worldwide in recent years. The rains that flooded West Africa last month and the resultant concomitant effects received very limited publicity in the Norwegian press. However, sources from the UN documents that 187 people lost their lives with over half a million heavily affected.
In Dakar, as in most other places hit by extreme weather conditions, it is the poorest who suffer the most. Shacks and personal belongings are washed away. Lack of basic social necessities including good drinking water and food for large households only increases the risk of acquiring and spreading diseases, where access to health services is not readily available. Entire neighbourhoods are left without electricity and are cut off from the main roads to the city. There were several days when Galy was locked in Pikine unable to get to the university or to work in the centre of town.
For a lot of flood victims in Dakar the flooding is not limited to the few months of rainy season. They live in water all year round. Just one new rainfall is all it takes to get area flooded again. To them the discussion among scientists and pressure groups on how to define and estimate the number of climate refugees are of little or no relevance.
The majority of the worst hit flood victims in Dakar now are those who actually moved from the countryside to the city during the great drought and famine disaster in the 70s and 80s south of the Sahara. They could no longer live off the land and in search for new land they ended up settling down in uninhabited areas of Dakar. These uninhabited areas in Dakar used to be swamps that had dried up after years of drought. (To date, the names of the settlements in these areas are identical to abandoned places in rural areas in Senegal.)
Increase in rainfall has turned the situation around and the swamp is back. But these poor migrant workers from the rural areas have no other choice but to continue to live in the waters.
Is it the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that affected the rainfall pattern in the Sahel and caused the drought? Can the increased in the amount of rainfall during the rainy season be a cause of climate change? And are the people in the marshy areas of Dakar eligible for climate refugees’ status?
Well, it’s too late to dwell on objections from climate change critics. The situation is real enough for the people who, as I write now, lay down to sleep on the roof because their beds are under water. Here, as on most poverty related questions, there are many factors at play. The fact that Senegal’s President Abdoulaye Wade chooses to use the state budget to erect a glory monument rather than to upgrade slums in the capital is also one of these factors.
But though the causes are ambiguous we can not disclaim our responsibility. Last weekend African heads of state gathered at the World Forum on Sustainable Development in Burkina Faso’s capital Ouagadougou. The goal was to speak with one voice at the climate summit in Copenhagen in December. In a so-called “Green Pact” statement from the meeting, they unanimously emphasized and demanded that rich and industrialized countries, who are largely culprits in environmental pollution, must assist developing countries in the adaptation to climate change.
Amnesty wants to be a serious player in combating poverty, side by side with those concerned. I believe that if we want to stand side by side with residents of Pikine, we must dare to draw the lines more clearly between CO2 emissions from affluent countries, climate change and the consequences for poor people in the south.
Today Amnesty puts pressure on policy makers to stop forced evictions and toxic factory emissions, to improve health access and to create international frameworks protecting human rights. Similarly, Amnesty should demand from both the international community and national leaders in the affected countries to cut emissions and take steps to help people in adapting to climate change and which in time will lift people out of poverty.
The environmental battle has become a pressing human rights issue. And the 7th of December is just the beginning of the race. Therefore Amnesty should be on the start line.
Kristin Rødland Buick is webeditor of amnesty.no at Amnesty International in Norway.
This post is part of the Blog Action Day 2009.
- Neste innlegg: Test
- Forrige innlegg: Blog Action Day: Klimaflyktning, fattigdomsfange