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Australia 1a. My Virtual Profile

Environment   Oct 2, 2017 by Niluni Madanayake- Pimlico

TIGed Profile

What is Climate Change?

In my opinion climate change is a natural process that if balanced cultivates life, for example, if it wasn’t for climate change we will have next to no chance of survival on the Earth as its climate may still be stuck in the Ice Ages. However, these natural processes are currently being accelerated due to human behavior leading to a rapid rise in global temperatures which is causing destruction.

How does global warming affect me?

Honestly, I am not directly impacted by global warming as we have the facilities to eliminate or reduce the impact of most problems regarding climate change and rising sea levels. We as more developed nations have to lend a helping hand to the less privileged who are facing these problems head on. However, on the door step of the region of Australia we live in, Townsville, lies the Great Barrier Reef the largest coral reef in the world. This remarkable ecosystem is facing a huge dilemma concerning coral bleaching, where the microscopic algae that live on these corals and feeds it simply abandons it due to ocean temperatures rising. After its only source of food is gone, the life of the coral is sucked out of it as is its colour.

Indigenous People and Climate Change

From the Bhutan Declaration on Climate Change and Mountain Indigenous Peoples:

“Even though we are suffering disproportionately from climate change impacts, we contribute the least to global emissions; nevertheless we have been marginalized from participating in the development and implementation of policies, programs, plans and actions related to our local adaptation.”**

Credit to the TIGed organisation and the Mountain Indigenous Peoples of Bhutan for providing us with this amazing perspective.

The way we live our daily lives and how much greenhouse gasses we emit might be truly effecting another person’s way of life. So this quote speaks for itself when it says that we should be conscious of our emissions and considerate of the countless communities that are suffering from this.


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1 Comment(s)

UalbertaKendra
Oct 6, 2017

Hi Niluni,

Thank you for your thoughtful engagement with the questions. I really appreciated your distinction between climate change as a natural process and human accelerated global warning. You are right, changes to the climate have and will continue to occur over time. In fact, the earth will continue to exist in one form or another, even if we make it inhospitable to humans. From this stand point, we must understand that humans build our communities and infrastructure around one iteration of our environment but are hugely contributing to the destruction of it. While it is vital to include conversations around our ecosystems and other living things dependent on them, the conversation around climate change largely revolves around the impact it will have on our human communities and how we have organized socially. 

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