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As preparations intensify for the COP26 Climate Summit, to be held in Glasgow this year, the focus is on efforts to prevent a future catastrophe.
But climate disasters are already unfolding in real time in the lives of the world's millions of poorest and most vulnerable people.
What will the Summit offer these women?
Put a pin on a map of global humanitarian emergencies and you will most likely land in a crisis that has been caused or exacerbated by droughts, floods and storms.
In 2019, extreme weather events pushed more than 34 million people into hunger and food insecurity.
In the 55 countries experiencing food insecurity crises, 75 million children under the age of five are chronically malnourished and face increased risks of diarrhea, pneumonia and other deadly diseases that go hand in hand with droughts and floods.
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Save the Children is responding to these emergencies.
In the Horn of Africa, our nutrition programs are caring for the children of farming families devastated by successive droughts, floods and the worst plague of desert locusts in a generation.
In the Sahel region, we are working with communities affected by drought and displaced by increasingly deadly water conflicts.
However, humanitarian efforts are overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis, and the worst is yet to come.
COP26 is one of our last opportunities to establish the necessary measures in order to maintain temperatures within the limit ceiling of 1.5 ° C to 2 ° Celsius that was established in 2015 in the Paris climate agreement.
But even 1.5 ° C of warming would have disastrous consequences in the poorest countries.
The evidence from climate science overwhelmingly indicates that rains will be less predictable, droughts will be more extreme, frequent and prolonged, and storms will be more destructive.
Meanwhile, the World Meteorological Organization predicts a long-term decline in food productivity in Africa, the world's most food-insecure region.
Rains will be less predictable, droughts will be more extreme, frequent and prolonged, and storms will be more destructive.
Rich countries are already investing heavily in their adaptation to threats related to climate change. When disasters strike, its citizens can turn to elaborate safety nets, well-funded healthcare systems, and insurance policies that cover loss and damage to assets. Flood defenses are being strengthened across Europe, and the current US Farm Bill includes a $ 39 billion (€ 32 billion) federal insurance program to protect heavily subsidized agricultural producers against losses of their crops.
The aforementioned contrasts with the situation faced by farmers in Africa. When extreme weather events destroy crops, kill livestock and raise food prices, families cope with these situations by reducing their meals and spending on health and education. Lacking insurance and savings, the poorest households are forced to sell their productive assets, including their livestock, preventing them from being able to recover. Livestock losses during Somalia's 2016 drought cost the country's farmers an estimated $ 2 billion (more than € 1.6 billion), representing an extraordinary loss for some of the world's poorest people. .
The international community's response to climate catastrophes is to provide humanitarian aid. Such aid saves lives, but the current system invariably delivers too little, too late. Last year, donors only provided half of the funding requested by the UN, a record deficit gap. And much of the aid came long after the most vulnerable families were forced to reduce their food consumption, withdraw children from school and sell their assets.
There is a better way to support the most vulnerable populations. Three years ago, I met pastoral women in Wajir, an arid area in northern Kenya, after a devastating drought. They had managed to avoid cutting back on children's meals or selling their livestock because they were receiving cash through a Kenyan safety program called the Safety Net Program. As soon as the drought struck, advance payments were automatically triggered based on river rainfall data.
Well-designed safety nets succeed when humanitarian aid fails because they support vulnerable people as soon as they begin to fall, rather than waiting until they hit the ground; therefore, these networks provide a springboard for their recovery. There is abundant evidence from the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and other regions on how small cash transfers improve nutrition, increase investment and boost crop production, especially when reaching women. And, these programs can respond quickly to a crisis. During the 2017 drought, Ethiopia's safety net was expanded to assist an additional three million people.
Early action is the key to a speedy recovery. Every dollar invested in recovery during the first weeks of a drought in the Horn of Africa can save poor farmers $ 50 (41 euros) in income and lost assets four months later. When linked to early warning systems, safety nets can also provide a platform for crisis prevention. In Bangladesh, vulnerable households received grants ahead of predicted floods, allowing them to relocate. Beyond saving lives and protecting assets, the program reached twice as many people as a previous humanitarian response, and at half the price.
Every dollar invested in recovery during the first weeks of a drought in the Horn of Africa can save poor farmers $ 50 in lost income and assets four months later
Targeted safety net programs could offer an efficient and equitable way to build resilience against climate change.
Unfortunately, they are weakest where they are most urgently needed.
Fewer than one in five people in low-income countries are currently covered;
And, in Africa, safety nets are chronically under-funded, fragmented and ill-equipped to address the significant challenge of responding to child poverty and malnutrition.
At COP26, world leaders should commission the World Bank and the United Nations to develop a strategy to reach the 155 million people facing food insecurity crises and prioritize children in designing safety nets .
Increased funding will be critical, especially given the post-pandemic fiscal constraints that many developing countries now face. The G7 has already agreed, in principle, to authorize a new allocation of the International Monetary Fund's reserve asset: special drawing rights (SDR). Reallocating these funds to the poorest countries would go a long way toward creating the fiscal space necessary to invest in safety nets. Additional debt relief and the $ 25 billion (€ 20.6 billion) of new financing proposed by the World Bank's International Development Association would also contribute to this fiscal space.
As host of COP26, the UK Government should focus its climate change adaptation efforts on stimulating targeted support for safety nets. Reversing its recent decision to cut the UK's foreign aid budget by a third would be a good starting point. Mutilating support for nutrition programs and climate-related humanitarian responses in regions like the Sahel and the Horn of Africa shows shortsighted negligence on the part of leaders and a shameful retreat from multilateralism.
Safety nets are not an antidote to climate injustice.
But, if these networks are linked to categorical measures to achieve net zero emissions by mid-century, they could limit the damage suffered by those who bear less responsibility for the climate crisis.
We must seize that opportunity at COP26.
Kevin Watkins
is Executive Director of Save the Children UK.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2021.
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