Driving too fast. Skydiving. Swearing at your mother-in-law. Or trying to live in an area hit by chronic droughts.
From dying animals in the north, to feeding vulnerable children in the east, my colleagues in CAFOD’s emergency response team have been blogging about the drought currently affecting Kenya.
And a World Bank study released last week confirmed it’s only going to get worse; that Kenya is one of the top twelve countries that will be hit hardest by longer droughts coming more often as a result of climate change.
And all respect to my colleagues; but I think I’ve got the best way to help in the long-term.
It’s all about reducing risk. Take the example of a car. There are plenty of hazards when driving; drunk drivers, children running across the street or broken brakes.
So how do you reduce your risk when driving? Well, you might wear a seatbelt, and you have your side impact bars, those airbags, your insurance policy, and even skills like good eyesight, years of behind-the-wheel experience and the driving lessons you took.
With these assets and skills, you can afford to drive a bit faster, and any hazards that come along are less likely to do serious injury to you.
It’s not that different with droughts. The drought is the hazard. And we know they’re going to keep coming. So what do we do?
Last week I sat down with local communities in drought-prone areas throughout the north of Kenya and they analysed for themselves the assets and skills they had in their favour (that’s the seatbelts).
I learnt a lot. For them, they said their safety-belts to protect them from droughts were things like building more water-points, cutting and keeping spare grass for the animals, having medicines ready for drought illnesses, good hygiene against cholera, making agreements in peacetime with neighbouring tribes to share limited resources, having local committee structures, the local government and NGO support, and having a plan in place for the worst.
If we could ‘up their safety belts’, so to speak, the next time a car-crash sized drought came, they might fair a bit better.
I also heard last week that the G8 politicians have agreed in principle to cut their own carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, and that global temperatures should not rise by more than 2 degrees.
However CAFOD’s climate specialists have not been overly impressed; there is a worrying lack of detail on the agreement. As I well know, communities in poor countries are already having to cope with life-threatening droughts.
But with a bit of help from CAFOD, we’re working with them so they can be in a stronger position to do so.
Click here to read more about our Climate Justice Campaign and see how you can help:
http://www.cafod.org.uk/take-action/climate
Posted by AgnesK
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