Climate Change: “We See Its Human Face Every Day”
For more than 40 years, WFP has been helping people whose lives depend on the vagaries of the weather. For these people, nature is both a friend and a foe. If it brings just enough rain, then crops will thrive and families will be fed. Too much rain - or too little - and disaster strikes.
ROME -- In communities where life hangs on the predictability of weather patterns, the accelerated changes in climate in recent decades have spelt misery, loss and hunger. The number of natural disasters in the world has doubled since the mid-1990s and WFP -- the UN agency that responds first when these disasters strike -- has seen its work intensify. In this sense, we know the human face of climate change only too well.
But we don't just give out food in emergency. We also help people adapt and prepare. Here are three ways that WFP has helped vulnerable people whose access to food depends on an increasingly unpredictable climate.
Experts from UN member states were in Geneva Aug 31- Sep 4 for a conference looking at ways to help countries cope with the effects of climate change. In many countries there is a significant impact on crop production, which is why several WFP experts attended the conference and also why WFP is stepping up collaboration with the World Meteorological Organization.
Family in trouble
Working with the Ethiopian government, WFP showed poor farmer Mulualem Tegegn how to exploit every drop of rain that falls on his land in the parched Amhara highlands. Now he and his family are self reliant for food and can now even sell some surplus food. Learn more
A WFP-supported project in Haiti is giving people food as an incentive for them to build gullies and walls on the bare hillsides around Gonaives. This should lessen the amount of rain water that floods into the city when the storm season comes. Learn more
It’s hard for poor people to build livelihoods that will allow them to escape hunger if their houses keep getting washed away by floods. Julekha, a poor Bangladeshi woman, has finally raised her house out of the reach of floodwaters thanks to a course run by the government and WFP. Learn more
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