Photo: IRIN
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JOHANNESBURG, 24 April 2013 (IRIN) - Studies out of
Ethiopia, India, Kenya and Niger show that children born during natural
hazards, like droughts or floods, are more likely to be malnourished. Yet as
the climate changes, it is poor countries - already struggling with hunger and
food insecurity - that are increasingly likely to face these natural hazards.
A recent conference considered this issue from the
perspective of “climate justice” - an approach to climate change focusing on
the rights of vulnerable people who are the least responsible for causing
climate change but among the most affected.
The Hunger-Nutrition-Climate Justice (HNCJ) conference,
held in Dublin, Ireland, was organized by Irish Aid, the Mary Robinson
Foundation, CGIAR and the World Food Programme (WFP). Among the topics explored
were “joined-up approaches” - also known as the “nexus” approach.
The nexus approach seeks to find solutions based on the
interconnections between various sectors or disciplines. For instance,
addressing interconnected malnutrition and climate change problems would
involve working across health, agriculture, environment, water and land
management sectors.
“No one level, sector or stakeholder group alone can
identify and implement sustainable solutions to complex societal challenges
such as hunger and climate change,” said one of the papers at the conference.
IRIN spoke to experts about how joined-up approaches and
"climate justice" can help improve nutrition for the most vulnerable
and shape sustainable development efforts in the future.
Joined-up approaches
Experts say the nexus approach is a way to advance the
social, environmental and economic aspects of sustainable development
simultaneously.
Oscar Ekdahl, WFP policy officer, says using joined-up
approaches to address hunger, nutrition and climate justice should come
naturally.
“People’s needs, as well as opportunities, are by nature
multi-sectoral,” he said. “More often than not, multiple sectors or service
providers - for example ministries of agriculture, social planning, and
environment - are required to effectively address issues such as hunger and
undernutrition.”
Building resilience among vulnerable populations -
entailing support from both humanitarian and development actors - can also help
address nutrition and climate change problems simultaneously, says José Luis
Vivero Pol, an anti-hunger activist with Université Catholique de Louvain.
“Well-nourished people and children will better cope with climate change
vagaries (either floods or droughts) than malnourished children,” he explained
via email.
FAO’s Richard China said the future of the nexus approach
will be determined by how countries choose to allocate resources to the
Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) - a set of goals the UN is formulating to
guide development after the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) end in 2015.
One of the criticisms levelled against the MDGs is that
they have encouraged countries to ensure funds flow through sectors, or to
adopt strategies with narrow sector-based approaches. Experts hope the SDGs
will instead promote inter-related interventions by the various sectors.
"The money you own cannot exclusively determine the food you get, as food is a basic human need"
China says the UN Secretary-General's Zero Hunger
Challenge, which aims to end hunger “in our lifetime”, underlines this
inter-related approach. Achieving the goals - “100 percent access to adequate
food; zero stunted children less than two [years old]; all food systems are
sustainable; 100 percent increase in smallholder productivity and income; and
zero loss and waste of food” - will require interventions across multiple
sectors, including agriculture, health, nutrition and climatology.
Overcoming status quo
IRIN has explored the nexus between hunger, nutrition and
health and the connections between water, energy and food, and has found that
rigidly organized governments are often the biggest deterrents to accepting
joined-up approaches.
Lawrence Haddad, director of the Institute for
Development Studies, says people already live in a joined-up world, and that
“it is governments, donors and researchers who have the luxury of fragmenting”
the world into sectors.
To address this, he suggests introducing more
problem-based training at the university level, which would encourage officials
to think across sectors. He also recommends funding projects that link sectors,
and ensuring government ministries are organized around problems rather than
sectors.
“None of these are easy, as they all will require
disruption of the status quo and all the vested interests aligned with them,”
he said.
Even so, WFP’s Ekdahl says governments have begun “to
budget time and finance required for this type of collaboration, but more is
required.”
Climate justice
Climate change disproportionately threatens the food
supplies of the most vulnerable, an issue campaigners for climate justice at
the UN talks on climate change have been raising.
Many advocates see a rights-based approach as essential
to both sustainable development and climate justice. The UN, for instance, has
been pushing countries to enact laws recognizing the right to affordable food,
which would compel governments to act in times of food insecurity.
In a joint paper for the HNCJ conference, UN Special
Rapporteur on the right to food Olivier De Schutter, former president of
Ireland Mary Robinson, and Tara Shine, the head of research and development at
the Mary Robinson Foundation, say ensuring the rights to food, life, health,
water and housing must be the foundation of any approach to sustainable
development.
But some are sceptical that this can be achieved.
Pol, the anti-hunger activist, says climate justice is a
“fancy word” and will only mean something if it "is implemented through
binding legal frameworks and mounting public budgets”, with more restraints on
the privatization of natural resources and common goods.
He adds that appealing for climate justice seems
meaningless when countries have failed to implement the Kyoto Protocol, which
aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and mitigate climate change.
“The money you own cannot exclusively determine the food
you get, as food is a basic human need,” Pol continued. “If we keep on thinking
along those lines, within 50 years we'll have to pay for breathing...another
human need."
He advocates the polycentric approach developed by Nobel
laureate Elinor Ostrom. This approach encourages natural resource management at
multiple levels, including within communities. Individuals, communities, local
governments and local NGOs should decide to take steps to address climate
change rather than waiting for a global agreement between governments,
according to Ostrom.
Getting it in writing
Haddad points to another inequality inherent in the
relationship between malnutrition and climate change: "There is another
type of injustice that affects everyone in the world - the injustice being the
legacy that this generation is leaving the next one - wherever they live. This
has some parallels with nutrition, because nutrition is also about what we as
adults can do to prevent stunting in the first 1,000 days after conception - a
legacy that plays out throughout the child's life... So there is a kindred
spirit between the two issues of climate change and undernutrition... I think
we could find ways to exploit it - perhaps in the context of the rising
interest in resilience."
WFP’s Ekdahl says that there is recognition of the
importance of nutrition and food security among officials negotiating a UN
treaty to prevent further global warming and to protect people from the effects
of climate change.
"However, there is less progress in terms of getting
specific nutrition language into the actual text" of the treaty, he said.
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