As world leaders prepare to head to Copenhagen for talks aimed at reaching a deal to slow the pace of climate change, people around the world are experiencing environmental destruction in myriad ways, some subtle, others devastating.
Here are just a few examples from recent months:
Dniprodzerzhynsk, Ukraine — ”This is not air — this is a horror,” says Natalya Maksymenko, a 25-year-old mother, screwing up her nose at the smoke belching out of factory chimneys in Dniprodzerzhynsk.
Dirt-encrusted shop fronts stretch out along Lenin Avenue in the industrial city of 250 000 people, birthplace of Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. They end in a haze at a gigantic steel complex surrounded by swirling fumes.
Ukraine has halved carbon dioxide output from 1990 levels to 345 million tonnes a year, according to United Nations statistics, allowing it to sell carbon emission rights it received under the Kyoto Protocol that are potentially worth billions of dollars.
”I was poisoned by coking coal fumes and after that I could not go to work at the factory because it affected my health badly,” said unemployed former steelworker Viktor (37).
”We don’t have the power to change anything,” he said with a shrug as he fished from a bridge over the river.
Port of Spain — For Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed, the cold numbers of the climate debate add up to the very survival of his tropical Indian Ocean state.
”Really, we are sandbanks, very precarious and delicate,” says Nasheed, who in October donned scuba gear to hold the world’s first underwater Cabinet meeting in a symbolic cry for help.
If global temperatures rise just 2 degrees Celsius, ”we won’t be around, we will be underwater,” he told Reuters in Trinidad and Tobago last month.
Nasheed tells fellow heads of state that 2 degrees Celsius warming would risk swamping the sand-rimmed coral atolls and islets, dotted with palm trees and mangrove clumps, that form his small country.
If UN predictions are correct, most of the low-lying Maldives will be submerged by 2100. Already the islanders’ livelihood from fishing and tourism is being hit, people are having to move to higher ground and disruption of sewage and water systems is causing outbreaks of disease like Chikungunya, a viral disease transmitted to humans by infected mosquitoes.
Meru, Kenya — Michimukuru’s tea is considered top-quality on the world market, but its 9 000 tea farmers are worried as increasingly scarce rainfall threatens their main source of income.
Farmers have watched rivers running through the green hills either disappear or narrow over the years. In 2006, the region exported 19-million kilograms of tea. By last year, the total had fallen to 13-million kilograms.
”We have been losing a lot of harvest over the last three years because of inadequate rainfall,” said Andrew Ethuru, one of the major farmers in Michimikuru.
He says the drive to maximise profits from booming tea production has led to the depletion of more than half of the forest cover in the village.
Marresale, Russia — The snows were late in coming on the Arctic Yamal peninsula where moist, dark permafrost entombed for 10 000 years crumbles into the sea at the top of the world.
Western scientists and environmentalists say collapsed river banks, rising tide waters and warmer winters in northwest Russia are clear signs of climate change, but they add Russia is in denial, ignoring a potentially disastrous ”methane bomb”.
At a state-run meteorological station at the Marresale port on the Kara Sea, about 500km north of the Arctic Circle, its director said migrating geese arrived a month earlier than usual this year, in May, as temperatures rose.
Over the last six years that Alexander Chikmaryov has worked at the station, the sea coast has eroded by at least two metres and hungry polar bears seeking alternative food have clawed into tins of condensed milk in his wife’s pantry.
But for Chikmaryov, global warming does not exist: ”Whoever made that ridiculous idea up spends too much time at home,” said the 58 year old, surveying an exposed strip of permafrost from a mud bank that has collapsed, giving way to streamlets littered with goose skeletons. — Reuters