Education as a means to promote sustainability.

• Author: Wisner, Ben

One of the myths current today, spread by media events such as Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth, is that everyone will be equal in facing the ecological and human catastrophe of climate change. This is simply not true. Clear thinking about climate change and its likely impact on cultural integrity, transmission, and diversity requires that one take note of the glaring differences today among people on the planet.

URGENT NEED TO IDENTIFY WINNERS AND LOSERS

Climate change will produce winners and losers. Africa and poor Africans will be more heavily impacted. (1) They and their governments have meagre technical and financial resources to provide capital-intensive buffers against the impact of climate change. For example, only one per cent of African agriculture uses irrigation. (2) Most people in rural sub-Saharan Africa to some extent remain dependent on rain-fed agriculture and livestock. While this is also true of a substantial number of rural people in northern China, parts of South and South-East Asia, Central America and the Andean countries, in most cases the nation-states in those regions have more capacity to assist rural people in adapting their livelihoods.

URGENT NEED TO UNDERSTAND AND SUPPORT PEOPLE'S SPONTANEOUS ADAPTATION

Cultural adaptation to climate change is going on right now. Isolated groups of rural people in the Andes, the mangrove-forested coasts of South-East Asia, and the savannas of Africa are not passively waiting for experts to come and tell them how to adapt. It is urgent to understand how rural people understand climate change and what they, themselves, are doing about it. Capacity for doing the participatory action research required to reveal spontaneous adaptation needs to be built up in countries where, to date, the emphasis has been on technical modelling and national policy formulation.

URGENT NEED TO PREPARE FOR POPULATION DISPLACEMENT

Climate change will exacerbate current trends in rural depopulation, international wage migration, forced displacement due to mega-projects, and the flight of people from conflict areas. Today international institutions and nongovernmental organizations are experienced in dealing with the problems produced by refugees and displacement. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees is one, the International Organization for Migration is another, the United Nations Development Programme has specialists who work on post-conflict recovery issues and...