Since I started working on Project Survival Media, several people asked me why I was working on a South American piece, when the region is barely affected by climate change. “Why not focus on the real deal”, they said, “the urgent deal, like the islands under water in the Pacific?”
As much as everybody is talking about Climate Change nowadays, they don’t seem to make a connection between this issue and what’s going on in South America.
The glaciers in the Andes might disappear by 2020. This alone means that 77 million people will possibly soon lack access to clean water. In the Pampa area – the green plains – the droughts have been so severe that the landscape very much resembles a desert. There has been no harvest, the cattle is dying, and even the collateral damage is starting to be reported – still no connections being made: many car crashes resulting in the death of people because of the dust carried by the wind in the narrow routes which aren’t prepared for this weather.
Nearer to river basins, the unpredictable storms are so heavy in rain the areas flood and people need to abandon their homes constantly.
And what if the Amazon disappears? Due to the way that evaporation and transpiration patterns work over the forest, when the trees leave, the rains stop. When the rains stop coming, nothing grows…and so it will continue.
The significance to people is eminent: Our economies are mostly based in agriculture. If we don’t have crops, we don’t eat, neither in the countryside nor in the cities. It soon stops being a question of being able to afford something and starts being a question of availability of food and survival. Food security is out there, slapping us in the face but we are not prepared to acknowledge it.
The reasons for the lack of recognition of what’s going on are many – political, economical, social. However, it is absolutely necessary that we start communicating that South America is also in deep trouble and how the problems we are witnessing there also relates to the larger global problem. We need to make sure that the message reaches the people, and that we put pressure on our governments too not to settle for a simplistic agreement. To demand what they must but also to contribute what they can.
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