A climate activist lays on an inflatable world globe in front of the Swiss House of Parliament at the start of a week of demonstrations called "Rise up for change" on September 21, in Bern. Fabrice Coffrini / AFP
A climate activist lays on an inflatable world globe in front of the Swiss House of Parliament at the start of a week of demonstrations called "Rise up for change" on September 21, in Bern. Fabrice Coffrini / AFP
A climate activist lays on an inflatable world globe in front of the Swiss House of Parliament at the start of a week of demonstrations called "Rise up for change" on September 21, in Bern. Fabrice Co
This is officially Climate Week and it's brought to the world by the United Nations and New York City, on the sidelines of the ongoing, virtual 75th UN General Assembly. Unofficially, climate week now runs throughout the year in some form or other, somewhere – an extreme weather event, a call to action, or a heated argument about whether global warming is a fact.
But this Climate Week is arguably different. A firestorm is sweeping the usual debates about climate change, as the US presidential campaign, America in general and the world as a whole is confronted with new visions of apocalypse – on the TV news and on the internet. America’s west coast is burning.
So is Siberia, as far north as the Arctic Circle. And so are Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands, one of the most bio-diverse areas in the world. In July, forest fires caused an Indonesian province on Borneo island to declare a state of emergency. Earlier this year, enormous tracts of the Australian continent were ablaze.
Each seems like the local chapter of an increasingly familiar global story, one in which large parts of the world are on fire. And in 2020, which is expected to be among the five warmest years on record, each raging fire appears to show that the planet is getting hotter, drier and more inhospitable.
Consider California’s customary fire season. It has become the state’s most destructive in modern memory and it is still only halfway done. Six of the state’s 10 largest wildfires have happened since 2018 and five were just this year. Millions of acres have burned, with the fires spreading into neighbouring Oregon and Washington, wreaking destruction on businesses and homes and leaving landscapes akin to Hawaii’s famous black sand beaches, except that these are charred and smoking. Even though the world’s most polluted cities are typically in Asia, in the past week, Portland, Oregon had significantly worse air quality than any other city in the world.
Smoke over neighbourhoods in Monrovia, California, September 13. California wildfires that have already incinerated a record 2.3 million acres this year and are expected to continue till December. David McNew/Getty Images/AFP
David McNew/Getty Images/AFP
The fires pumped an estimated 110 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the smoke blew all the way from the west to cities on America’s east coast, creating hazy conditions and weirdly orange skies in Washington, DC and New York. According to satellite data from the European Union’s Copernicus atmospheric monitoring services, the smoke travelled as far as northern Europe. Meanwhile, the towering fires forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people. With the Red Cross on the ground and struggling to find shelter for more displaced people than there were hotel rooms, the volunteers were often heard using a word that might seem odd in the richest country in the world. “Refugees”, they called the Americans displaced by the historic blaze.
Refugees is the right word but it has entered public consciousness way too late. Back in 2015, then US secretary of state John Kerry was warning a foreign ministers’ conference in Alaska to prepare for “climate refugees”.
It will keep getting worse, as long as we keep adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere
That was the year an estimated two million people fleeing the Syrian civil war would pour into Europe. But that migration, according to a 2015 paper in the ‘Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences’, an American journal, was initially from the hinterland into Syrian cities.
Syrians in rural areas were desperate after “the worst three-year drought in the instrumental record”, the researchers wrote, identifying “a long-term drying trend” as well as a “warming trend in the Eastern Mediterranean (caused by the increase in greenhouse gases)”.
Decades of state-decreed, water-intensive agricultural practices had led to the unsustainable depletion of groundwater and the drying of the Khabur river in north-eastern Syria. Crops failed and the farmers moved to the cities.
As with all migration, this triggered tensions and eventually, massive unrest. So, when Mr Kerry declared that “we as leaders of countries will begin to witness what we call climate refugees”, he was using the wrong tense. The world was already witnessing climate refugees. The phenomenon was not in the future.
In any case, Mr Kerry was five years late in drawing attention to the issue of climate refugees. In 2010, Frank Bierman, an environmental policy professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, led controversial research that warned there may be as many as 200 million climate refugees by 2050. He recommended the creation of an international resettlement fund. An ambitious but poorly funded nest egg of sorts was subsequently set up by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
But it was only in 2018 that the UN negotiated a global migration treaty that became the first to recognise climate as a cause of future displacement. The US refused to join 164 other countries in signing it.
The myopia of America, led by US President Donald Trump, is both outrageous and tragic as its burning west coast is creating climate refugees, albeit those seeking haven within their country’s borders.
Last year was the first time in a decade that more people left California for other US states than arrived. And however high the walls that America builds to keep foreign climate refugees out, there will continue to be an inexorable flow from water-stressed, hungry parts of central America towards the vast, rich country next door.
New projections for global climate-induced migration range from 50 million to 300 million in the next few decades. It is telling that Philip Duffy, head of the Woodwell Climate Research Centre in Massachusetts, recently rejected the idea that raging fires, melting Arctic sea ice, simultaneous hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean and the hottest summer in the northern hemisphere could be described as “the new normal”. It is not, he said, because “it will keep getting worse, as long as we keep adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere”.
A giant inflatable model of the Earth during European Sustainable Development Week, as well on World Clean Up day, at the garden of Czech Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague, Czech Republic, September 19. Martin Divisek / EPA
So climate week seems doomed to stretch into decades. Sometimes, it is novelists who tell the future. Margaret Atwood ended her acclaimed ‘MaddAddam’ trilogy about a dystopian post-pandemic world on fire as follows: “The people in the chaos cannot learn. They cannot understand what they are doing to the sea and the sky and the plants and the animals. They cannot understand that they are killing them, and that they will end by killing themselves.”
Fiction is becoming fact before our eyes.
Rashmee Roshan Lall is a columnist for The National
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Day 5, Dubai Test: At a glance
Moment of the day Given the problems Sri Lanka have had in recent times, it was apt the winning catch was taken by Dinesh Chandimal. He is one of seven different captains Sri Lanka have had in just the past two years. He leads in understated fashion, but by example. His century in the first innings of this series set the shock win in motion.
Stat of the day This was the ninth Test Pakistan have lost in their past 11 matches, a run that started when they lost the final match of their three-Test series against West Indies in Sharjah last year. They have not drawn a match in almost two years and 19 matches, since they were held by England at the Zayed Cricket Stadium in Abu Dhabi in 2015.
The verdict Mickey Arthur basically acknowledged he had erred by basing Pakistan’s gameplan around three seam bowlers and asking for pitches with plenty of grass in Abu Dhabi and Sharjah. Why would Pakistan want to change the method that has treated them so well on these grounds in the past 10 years? It is unlikely Misbah-ul-Haq would have made the same mistake.
You can donate to several registered charities through a “donation catalogue”. The use of the donation is quite specific, such as buying a fan for a poor family in Niger for Dh130.
The site has an e-donation service accepting debit card, credit card or e-Dirham, an electronic payment tool developed by the Ministry of Finance and First Abu Dhabi Bank.
You can donate online or order Smiles n’ Stuff products handcrafted by Al Noor students. The centre publishes a wish list of extras needed, starting at Dh500.
Beit Al Khair Society has the motto “From – and to – the UAE,” with donations going towards the neediest in the country. Its website has a list of physical donation sites, but people can also contribute money by SMS, bank transfer and through the hotline 800-22554.
Dar Al Ber Society, which has charity projects in 39 countries, accept cash payments, money transfers or SMS donations. Its donation hotline is 800-79.
Dubai Cares provides several options for individuals and companies to donate, including online, through banks, at retail outlets, via phone and by purchasing Dubai Cares branded merchandise. It is currently running a campaign called Bookings 2030, which allows people to help change the future of six underprivileged children and young people.
Those who travel on Emirates have undoubtedly seen the little donation envelopes in the seat pockets. But the foundation also accepts donations online and in the form of Skywards Miles. Donated miles are used to sponsor travel for doctors, surgeons, engineers and other professionals volunteering on humanitarian missions around the world.
On the Emirates Red Crescent website you can choose between 35 different purposes for your donation, such as providing food for fasters, supporting debtors and contributing to a refugee women fund. It also has a list of bank accounts for each donation type.
Gulf for Good raises funds for partner charity projects through challenges, like climbing Kilimanjaro and cycling through Thailand. This year’s projects are in partnership with Street Child Nepal, Larchfield Kids, the Foundation for African Empowerment and SOS Children's Villages. Since 2001, the organisation has raised more than $3.5 million (Dh12.8m) in support of over 50 children’s charities.
Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum launched the Noor Dubai Foundation a decade ago with the aim of eliminating all forms of preventable blindness globally. You can donate Dh50 to support mobile eye camps by texting the word “Noor” to 4565 (Etisalat) or 4849 (du).
The internal combustion engine is facing a watershed moment – major manufacturer Volvo is to stop producing petroleum-powered vehicles by 2021 and countries in Europe, including the UK, have vowed to ban their sale before 2040. The National takes a look at the story of one of the most successful technologies of the last 100 years and how it has impacted life in the UAE.
The more you save, the sooner you can retire. Tuan Phan, a board member of SimplyFI.com, says if you save just 5 per cent of your salary, you can expect to work for another 66 years before you are able to retire without too large a drop in income.
In other words, you will not save enough to retire comfortably. If you save 15 per cent, you can forward to another 43 working years. Up that to 40 per cent of your income, and your remaining working life drops to just 22 years. (see table)
Obviously, this is only a rough guide. How much you save will depend on variables, not least your salary and how much you already have in your pension pot. But it shows what you need to do to achieve financial independence.
'Spies in Disguise'
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Stars: Will Smith, Tom Holland, Karen Gillan and Roshida Jones
One showed 28 per cent of female students at a Dubai university reported symptoms linked to depression. Another in Al Ain found 22.2 per cent of students had depressive symptoms - five times the global average.
It said the country has made strides to address mental health problems but said: “Our review highlights the overall prevalence of depressive symptoms and depression, which may long have been overlooked."
Prof Samir Al Adawi, of the department of behavioural medicine at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, who was not involved in the study but is a recognised expert in the Gulf, said how mental health is discussed varies significantly between cultures and nationalities.
“The problem we have in the Gulf is the cross-cultural differences and how people articulate emotional distress," said Prof Al Adawi.
“Someone will say that I have physical complaints rather than emotional complaints. This is the major problem with any discussion around depression."
