Extreme droughts, devastating floods, desertification: in six years, “acute hunger” has more than doubled in the countries most exposed to climatic disasters, according to the NGO Oxfam, which calls on industrialized states to massively reduce their gas emissions greenhouse effect and to repair the damage caused.
In ten countries (Somalia, Haiti, Djibouti, Kenya, Niger, Afghanistan, Guatemala, Madagascar, Burkina Faso and Zimbabwe), 48 million people are acutely food insecure and require emergency assistance to survive. Even eighteen million of them are considered to be on the verge of starvation.
Although conflicts and economic crises continue to be the main causes of hunger, “extreme weather events, which are becoming more numerous and violent, also reduce the ability of poor populations to counteract hunger and face future crises,” he stresses. the NGO.
A call to rich countries
For Oxfam, the fact that the states least responsible for the climate crisis are the ones that suffer the most “is conclusive evidence of the existence of global inequalities.”
The industrialized countries and in particular those of the G20 are “responsible for more than three quarters of the world’s carbon emissions”, while these ten vulnerable countries collectively emit only 0.13%, the NGO stresses.
“In less than 18 days, the profits of fossil fuel companies would be enough to finance all the UN humanitarian appeals for 2022”, which amount to 49,000 million dollars, it also calculates.
At the 2022 UN General Assembly that opens on Tuesday and COP27, scheduled for November, world leaders must commit to massively cut their emissions and “offer compensation to countries most affected by the damage” they suffer, Oxfam pleads. . Canceling the debt of these vulnerable states would also allow them to invest in the fight against the climate emergency.
Source: BFM TV
