La Strada Documentation Center

Climate Change: State of the World's Minorities

Document number
1941
Date
2008
Title
Climate Change: State of the World's Minorities
Author/publisher
Minority Rights Group International
Availability
View/save PDF version of this document
Document type(s)
Research/Study/Analysis,
Keywords
Unemployment, Poverty, Community development, Social security, Social exclusion, Globalisation; Global warming, Food security, Natural resources
Summary
The effects of the changing climate are bad enough in themselves – more frequent hurricanes and droughts, burning temperatures, new plagues of diseases and worse floods, for instance. But the general failure to recognize and respond to minorities’ resulting problems greatly exacerbates their suffering. Disadvantage and discrimination affect them at every stage, including in the immediate aftermath of climate-related disasters and during official planning at local, national and international levels for coping with the current and future impacts of climate change. The close relationship of some indigenous peoples and minorities with their natural environments makes them especially sensitive to the effects of global warming. In some cases, peoples’ ways of life and even their very existence are being threatened by climate change, and by the rapidly increasing cultivation of biofuels, which are being touted as part of the ‘solution’.
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