Tag: Climate Change

In Chad, Climate Change Is Already Reality

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In Chad, the country rated most in peril to climate vulnerability; climate change is the reality. Chad sees high poverty, frequent conflicts, droughts, and floods.

Around 40 million people depend on Lake Chad. Yet, the lake has nearly disappeared over the last 50 years. The shrinking lake forces men to leave their communities during the dry season to look for work in the city, leaving women and children behind to manage the crops.

The drought diminishing Lake Chad — from 1973 to 2001, primarily in Chad, Central Africa. Shown in a composite of NASA satellite images.
The drought diminishing Lake Chad — from 1973 to 2001, primarily in Chad, Central Africa. Shown in a composite of NASA satellite images. The large image is a composite of photos taken with en:Landsat-7. Images courtesy NASA GSFC Scientific Visualization Studio and Landsat 7 Project Science Office.

Across the Sahel desert, many farmers are reviving an old technique called Zaï, which involves digging pits to catch rainwater and sowing crops in the pits. The method concentrates nutrients and can increase crop yields by up to 500%.

Chad also struggles with poverty, with the fourth-highest poverty rate in the world. Around 87% of Chadians are poor, according to the Multidimensional Poverty Index, which factors in health, education, and living standards. Further, 63% of the population are “destitute,” the most extreme category of poverty. The size of the destitute population is also the fourth highest in the world.

Climate change will make life increasingly harder, making the changing climate reality even more real. Chad will be hotter and arider, yielding lower crop yields and worse pasture.

Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim is a Mbororo pastoralist and President of the Association for Indigenous Women and Peoples of Chad (AFPAT). In this video, she explains what it’s like to live in Chad, where the effects of climate change are reality.

Climate Change and Why We Should Panic

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British Academy Film Award and Academy Award nominee, Keira Knightley, OBE, has come out in support of Extinction Rebellion.

Keira has lent her voice to defend the climate and tell the truth in this new, short film that summarizes the crisis from how we got here, and what we must do now.

The animation shows why government must enter crisis mode and choose a different path than the one we are on because it will lead us to extinction.

Keira joins Emma Thompson, Stephen Fry, William Dafoe, Javier Bardem, Paloma Faith, Radiohead and all other people who know that we are facing an unprecedented global emergency.

The Battle Against Climate Change by Paul Kingsnorth

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Humanity has lost the battle against climate change. That is what Paul Kingsnorth thinks. The former environmental activist believes that we can’t stop climate change anymore. How should we live on knowing that climate change is a fact that can’t be denied anymore? A documentary that gives thinker and writer Paul Kingsnorth the time to explain how humanity still can be hopeful although the battle against climate change in his eyes has been lost.

Former environmental activist and writer Paul Kingsnorth has withdrawn to Ireland on a unspoilt part of the earth. You could say that he lives now at the end of the world. A portrait of an end-time thinker who nevertheless does not give up hope and continues to believe in the power of nature.

Thinker and writer Paul Kingsnorth stood early on the barricades as a conservationist. He resisted the insatiable hunger of the globalized world for more land, resources and things in England and on the other side of the world in Papa New Guinea. Kingsnorth was one of the leaders of the environmental movement and reached a large international audience with its passionate speeches. But at some point, he came to terms that he had to revisit his belief that humanity could save the world.

In his bundled essays “Confessions of a recovering environmentalist” (2017) he describes how some weak-kneed accountants of this world hollowed out the green movement from the inside and exchanged the barricades for ties and conference tables. Limiting CO2 emissions became the new gospel because it was measurable and countable. But according to Kingsnorth, that is an illusion. He thinks that in his victory rush, the green movement of today exchanges the remaining wild nature for a wind or solar panel farm. The battle is lost.

Kingsnorth withdrew with his family to the Irish countryside to live self-sufficient. He founded the “Dark Mountain Project” in which writers, poets and artists are looking for a different view of the end of the world, based on the connection between man and nature. He exchanged his clenched fist and protesting voice for an inner, literary search for the question of what makes us human and what our place is on this magical planet.

Original titel: De aarde draait door
Originally broadcasted by VPRO in 2018. © VPRO Backlight December 2018.