MORE THAN 300 million people in Asia alone have seen their lives and livelihoods destroyed by floods the last three months. An area the Size of Europe has been affected. Floods have also occurred in places as diverse as Chiapas in South East Mexico and in Belgium.
Other weather related disasters include Hurricane Georges which resulted in Puerto Rico being declared a disaster zone as well as the rather more publicised effect it had in the United States. the past 200 years the frequency of El Nino has increased from one every 5 years to every 2.8 years and there is increasing evidence that this is as a result of global warming - in other words, of human intervention.
In other areas droughts and or forest fires have been prevalent. In Indonesia in 1997 two million hectares …ot land was burned mainly by plantation companies and logging concessions in Kalimantan and Sumatra leaving an incalculable human, animal and ecological disaster in its wake his vear new tires have been detected and old ones restarted. The causes. are the same and the damage if anything worse.. Meanwhile in West Papua famine is killing thousands after last year's El Nino driven drought destroyed crops and dried up rivers. Those who are surviving the famine are likely to fall prey to malaria.
These tragedies are not however the result of 'freak' weather conditions. Climatologist Mick Kelly of the University of East Anglia explains : "There is a long-term underlying trend of climate change but gical increase in extreme weather or any greatly increased severity." Instead he points out; "There is a greatly increased vulnerability of people following over-exploitation of resources, the clearing of torests and changing of river courses".
Disasters mainly hit poor people in poor countries. In Japan the average disaster kills 63 people. In Peru the average death toll is 2,900.
This summers floods in China and the Indian sub-continent have been directly blamed on massive deforestation in the uplands. Forest cover slows or prevents the run off of water. The issue is not so much how much rain falls but onto what sort of ground. Floods affect more people than any other disaster other than drought, but they occur much more frequently.
Now the Chinese government have declared that reforestation will begin after this summer's disasters. the case of Bangladesh most deforestation took place outside the countries lowland borders. More than half the country is only 5 metres above sea level and three quarters largest delta in the world.
At the sametime the Ganges has been diverted from its course into the Hoogly Channel for irrigation purposes. This means that a great deal of river sediment that sued to pour into Bangladesh does not do so. The country is effectively sinking - a fate it can definitely not afford.
These examples demonstrate graphically that ecological issues around need to be tackled on an international basis just as issues around the ozone layer and global warming do.
Bangladeshi Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina Wazed pointed out "This kind of flood never happened in Bangladesh., although flooding is very common in our country. Had it been a natural flood, we could have faced it."
But Bangladesh's own development has also contributed to the problem. During the 1980s some 100,00 tube wells and 20,000 deep wells were sunk into the delta to provide drinking water for the rapidly growing population. More than 110 million people live in 149,000 sq km - the world's densest population. The wells have altered the water table to such an extent that they added to Desperate times in Bangladesh: but the crisis was worsened by human intervention the country's subsidence at an annual rate of 2.5cm.
Global warming itself contributes to the rise in sea level -threatening the country and its mangrove swamps and fisheries still further.
Modern methods are not necessarily the best way to cope with floods. The Flood Action Plan funded by the World Bank and Western governments set out the construct embankments along all the major rivers in Bangladesh to contain the floods. This has not helped, as the floods have been so fierce that they have swept away the embankments or have diverted water to other parts of the country. There is an urgent need to return to widespread low tech irrigation canals and dykes which provided ample flood protection prior to colonisation Peter Walker of the International Red Cross states that one third of all disasters today are weather-related as distinct from 5 per cent only 5 years ago. The agency has appealed for funds to deal with situations in more than 25 countries. "Governments are increasingly ing in number and in effect. In the 1970s six times more people died as the result of weather -related catastrophes than in the 1960s, but the number of disasters went up by only 50 per cent. The capitalist system misuses the environment in ways that makes it more prone to disasters and makes poor people more vulnerable to its effects.
The greed for profit is polluting our water, our food and destabilising our weather systems. Socialists have every interest in raising these issues and working around them. It is our planet too!