Climate crisis

As global leaders creatively recycle terms to underscore the importance of seizing the “last chance” for action at the COP26 climate summit, hundreds of thousands of poor families living on parched hills above Peru’s capital are already on the dark side of the climate tipping point.

Andean glaciers are in sharp decline – Peru’s glacial area shrank by nearly a third from 2000 to 2016, experts estimate – and it’s expected that resulting water shortages will affect millions in the coming decades in and around Lima, the world’s second most populous desert city.

“It’s difficult to live on the hills where there is no water,” Berta Sulcapoma, a community leader in Pamplona Alta, an arid collection of vertiginous slums above Lima, told The New Humanitarian. “They only send water trucks every 15 days. And when they come, you have to get a lot of water all at once.” At 25 soles ($6.50) a go, the expense of filling up can be too much for residents, who are primarily employed in the informal sector and rely on work that has been in short supply during the pandemic.

For two weeks from 31 October, delegates from 197 countries meeting in Glasgow, Scotland will have a hefty agenda of unfinished work left over from the last climate conference in Madrid in December 2019, but they may not be thinking enough about people like Sulcapoma.

The headline items will be emission cuts, climate finance for poorer nations, and defining rules for carbon markets. But while the aid sector will certainly be looking out for stronger and more detailed commitments from the world’s biggest polluters to cut their emissions by 2030 and stave off further global warming, it will also be looking for more urgent action right now to help with the growing humanitarian needs already being created by the climate crisis. 

 

_{Source & credit: Humanitarian new}

^{Photo by Li-An Lim on Unsplash}