Climate Change Adaptation

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Climate Change Adaptation


Image by amirjina
If you give a man a goat, is he more able to adapt to climate change?

My answer is yes! In Bangladesh, people are faced with multiple annual disasters. Climate change is increasing the risks from these disasters – by making them more frequent or intense – and people are struggling to cope with even current hazards. The main way that these disasters (floods in the case of this community) affect the people is not through loss of life, though that is common. It is through loss of livelihood – people’s crops, fields and possessions are destroyed by floods each year, leaving them with little choice but to take loans to buy food, and trapping them in a cycle of poverty.

One way to lower this impact is to diversify their livelihoods – if a family lives on income from their crops, and those crops get destroyed, they are greatly impacted. But if they get their income from a number of different sources, not all of their income will be lost when a flood strikes. So, give them a goat and they can get milk, sell the kids, or sell it for meat. A goat is easier to carry to high ground than a whole field of rice.

As climate change increases risk, so diversifying livelihoods decreases it. To adapt to a more dangerous future, decreasing risk now is vital.

To see why I was in Bangladesh click here, or take a look at the previous or next photo in the series.

If you are interested, please view the series to see what I found and what I learned in my few weeks in Bangladesh, visiting some of the most vulnerable people anywhere on our planet.

Oxfam Ireland climate migrant installation


Image by Oxfam International
An estimated 26 million people have already been displaced as a result of climate stresses.

Miniature migrant climate camp set up in Dublin (and in other EU capitals) as Oxfam reminds EU heads of state what is at stake if they fail to provide new money for poor communities to protect themselves from climate change.

European climate decision this week: push your leader now

Dublin, 28 October 2009
Credit: Leon Farrell/Oxfam

Oxfam Ireland climate migrant installation


Image by Oxfam International
An estimated 26 million people have already been displaced as a result of climate stresses.

Miniature migrant climate camp set up in Dublin (and in other EU capitals) as Oxfam reminds EU heads of state what is at stake if they fail to provide new money for poor communities to protect themselves from climate change.

European climate decision this week: push your leader now

Dublin, 28 October 2009
Credit: Leon Farrell/Oxfam

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