Sleepwalking into Catastrophe - Climate Change

Nov 26, 2019 | Linda Witong
View Original

Special Advisor to SI Advocacy, Linda Witong, takes a closer look at how and why climate change aggravates inequalities and increases the risks to women and girls of gender-based violence.

“The world is still ‘sleepwalking’ into the ‘catastrophe’ known as climate change – even though we have been warned that climate impacts are now hitting harder and sooner than climate assessments indicated even a decade ago. This trend is resulting in appalling impacts on our environment including our land, our freshwater systems, our oceans, the air we breathe, our ecosystems and all of earth’s inhabitants or what is left of them. For example, extreme rainfall has been involved in 8 out of the 10 natural disasters that caused the most deaths in the first half of 2017 – as eight involved floods or landslides. Storms and other weather-related hazards were also a leading cause of displacement; 76% of the 31.1 million people displaced during 2016 were forced from their homes as a result of weather-related events.