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Oxfam reaction to the IPCC’s Working Group III report on climate change mitigation

Responding to the publication today of the IPCC’s Working Group III report on climate change mitigation, Oxfam’s Climate Policy Lead Nafkote Dabi said:

“This IPCC report pulls no punches. The bleak and brutal truth about global warming is this: barring action on a sweeping scale, humanity faces worsening hunger, disease, economic collapse, mass migration of people and unbearable heat. It’s not about taking our foot off the accelerator anymore —it’s about slamming on the brakes. A warming planet is humanity’s biggest emergency.

“No amount of adaptation can compensate for the terrible consequences of failing to hit the Paris goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C. This is a survival target and it remains within our grasp, but just barely. After a dip in 2020, carbon emissions that fuel climate change have bounced back to pre-pandemic levels. We need extraordinary cuts in the use of fossil fuels to meet our emissions targets, and that entails a dramatic shift towards sustainable renewable energy. The recent push to increase production of oil, gas and coal and backtrack on climate measures because of the crisis in Ukraine —and even to delay net-zero— is shortsighted folly.

Oxfam Aotearoa Campaign Lead Alex Johnston said:

“Today, the world’s leading scientists urge world leaders, again, to act now, act quickly and act on a much larger scale than planned. It is clear that New Zealand’s response to the climate crisis is completely inadequate to the scale of the challenge we are facing. Domestic action planned by the government would reduce emissions by only about 9 percent by 2030. It is simply not enough.

“The New Zealand government’s Emissions Reduction Plan must do more to cut climate pollution faster and fairer, particularly in our largest polluting sectors of agriculture and transport to protect the things we love and ensure those on the frontlines of climate change can thrive, not just survive.”

Nafkote Dabi said: “Climate change is causing extreme weather disasters now and their costs are piling up. But these costs do not hit everyone equally. People living in poverty are suffering first and worst. Farmers in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia have lost crops and entire herds of livestock to an exceptionally long and severe drought. Millions of people in East Africa are now on the brink of a hunger catastrophe. Meanwhile the richest people who have massive carbon footprints are turning up the air-conditioning on their mega yachts.

“The other clear message from this report is that every single action to cut emissions counts and every fraction of a degree matters. The world is currently heading for 2.7°C of warming under current plans. That is a death sentence for climate-vulnerable countries like Vanuatu and Bangladesh. Wealthy countries are disproportionately responsible for the climate crisis and they have the double responsibility to both cut emissions at home and to support developing countries with the costs of replanting crops and rebuilding homes after storms, and moving from dirty energy forms to cleaner, lower-carbon ones.

“This monumental climate report is distressing but it is not surprising. Scientists and the IPCC have been warning governments of this danger for decades. Our future lies in the decisions we make today. We cannot tackle climate change later. We must clamp down on emissions now or face more catastrophic climate disasters, season after season.”

 

Notes:

As many as 28 million people across East Africa at risk of extreme hunger if rains fail again

Global food and commodity prices spiking in reaction to Ukraine crisis set to worsen hunger for 21 million people already today in severe food insecurity 

As many as 28 million people across East Africa face severe hunger if the March rains fail. With the unfolding crisis in Ukraine taking their attention, there is a real danger that the international community will not respond adequately to the escalating hunger crisis in East Africa until it is too late, Oxfam warned today.

A massive “no regrets” mobilization of international humanitarian aid is needed now to avert destitution and to help the 21 million people already facing severe levels of hunger in the midst of conflict, flooding, and a massive two-year drought – unprecedented in 40 years – in countries across East Africa.

“East Africa faces a profoundly alarming hunger crisis. Areas of Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan and beyond are experiencing an unfolding full-scale catastrophe. Even if the rains do arrive this month, full recovery will be near impossible unless urgent action is taken today,” said Gabriela Bucher, Oxfam Executive Director.

“The repercussions of the Ukrainian conflict on the global food system will reverberate around the globe, but it is the poorest and most vulnerable people who will be among those hit hardest and fastest. Rising food prices are a hammer blow to millions of people who are already suffering multiple crises, and make the huge shortfall in aid potentially lethal.” said Bucher.

Covid-related hikes in global food and commodity prices were already undermining the options available to heavily indebted African governments to resolve the mass hunger facing their people. However, the crisis in Ukraine will have catastrophic new consequences as it already pushes up food and commodity prices beyond what East African governments can afford.

Countries in East Africa import up to 90% of their wheat from Ukraine and Russia. As disruptions begin to affect the global trade in grains, oil, transport and fertilizer, food prices are beginning to skyrocket. They hit an all-time high last week. In Somalia, the prices for staple grains were more than double those of the previous year.

In 2010-11, similar spikes in food prices pushed 44 million more people worldwide into extreme poverty, and indications are that the food-price inflation happening now will be even worse.

Ahmed Mohamud Omar (70), a pastoralist from Wajir County in Kenya, told Oxfam: “Due to the droughts our donkeys have perished and the ones remaining are too weak to pull carts. My only tuktuk is now parked idle because I can’t afford its fuel. I no longer have my camels or goats, I think about what will my family eat, where will their next meal come from, whether I will get the daily jerrican of water.”

Nyadang Martha, from Akobo in South Sudan said: “All the 40 years of my life, I have never seen anything like what is happening here in Akobo. For the past four years, it is either flood, drought, famine, violence, or COVID-19. This is just too much. I am tired of living. If it continues like this, I doubt if my girls will become full adults.”

“The world cannot again talk itself into inertia as people are pushed into extreme food insecurity. To not act now would be immoral and a dereliction of the humanitarian imperative,” said Bucher.

  • Over 13 million people across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia have been displaced in search of water and pasture, just in the first quarter of 2022. Millions of others had to flee their farmlands and homes by conflicts especially around Ethiopia – where 9.4m people now need urgent humanitarian aid.
  • The region has suffered from the worst plague of locusts in 70 years and flash flooding that have affected nearly a million people in South Sudan.
  • Kenya has suffered a 70 percent drop in crop production and has declared a national disaster with 3.1m people in acute hunger, now in need of aid. Nearly half of all households in Kenya are having to borrow food or buy it on credit.
  • Ethiopia is facing its highest level of food insecurity since 2016, in Somali region alone 3.5m people experience critical water and food shortage. Almost a million livestock animals have died, leaving pastoralists who entirely depend on herding for survival with nothing. Women tell us heart-breaking stories about having to skip meals so that they can feed their children.
  • More than 671,000 people have recently migrated away from their homes in Somalia because nearly 90% of the country is in severe drought. This will likely leave almost half of Somali children under five acutely malnourished.
  • In South Sudan, an estimated 8.3 million people will face severe food insecurity this lean season (May-July) as climatic and economic shocks intensify.

Despite alarming need, the humanitarian response is woefully underfunded. Only 3% of the total $6bn UN 2022 humanitarian appeal for Ethiopia, Somalia and South Sudan, has been funded to date. Kenya has only secured 11% of its UN flash appeal to date.

Idris Akhdar from WASDA a 21-year Kenyan partner with Oxfam, from Wajir County, North Eastern Kenya said: “Our team have met desperate people. People who are hungry, who are thirsty, and who are about to lose hope. In the last few days, I have seen across the region – Somali region in Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya – the same hunger and destitution all over. We appeal to the international community to help.”

Jilo Roba, Coordinator at the Department for Children’s Services in Kenya, one of Oxfam partners, said: “There’s a family I visited two days ago, they married off their young daughter. The father was sick so he borrowed money to go to hospital and, when he couldn’t repay it, they had to let their daughter go.” 

Diyaara Ibrahim Gulie, from Wajir County in Kenya who has received food and cash assistance via Oxfam says: “We now have to skip meals and resort to one meal a day. And at times we have to prioritize the children`s eating and starve the grown-ups in order to sustain what little food we have.”

Oxfam together with local partners, is redoubling its support for those impacted by the East African hunger crisis, aiming to reach over 1.5 million people most in need with lifesaving water, cash, shelter and sanitation facilities. Oxfam will help people to build rebuild their lives from these climatic shocks.

“East Africa cannot wait. The hunger crisis, fuelled by changes in our climate and COVID-19, is worsening by the day. Oxfam is calling on all donors to urgently fill the UN humanitarian appeal funding gap, and to get funds as quickly as possible to local humanitarian organisations. The governments and warring parties in conflict zones need to ensure humanitarian agencies like Oxfam can safely reach the most vulnerable people,” said Bucher. 

“We call upon the governments especially from grain exporting countries to do all they can to find suitable alternatives to the imminent disruption in the supply chain from Ukraine towards low-income, food-import dependent countries. And – as we witness the tremors triggered by the failure in international efforts to tackle the climate crisis – we underscore the need to ramp up action on climate adaptation and mitigation,” said Bucher.

Notes

Oxfam response in East Africa:

  • In South Sudan: Oxfam has provided support to over 400,000 people and aims to reach and additional 240,000 people with safe water, sanitation and hygiene services and promotion, cash grants for families to buy food and other essentials, and livelihood support like seeds, tools, fishing kits.
  • In Somalia, Oxfam aims to reach 420,000 people this year with lifesaving water, sanitation and health support, including drilling boreholes in water insecure areas, distributing hygiene kits, providing materials to help protect communities from water borne diseases, and distributing cash, seeds tools, and training farmers in small scale greenhouse farming. Oxfam will also support livestock treatment and vaccination campaigns together with the Ministry of Livestock, train community protection volunteers on gender-based violence issues, and distribute solar lamps to protect women and girls at night. To date we have reached over 260,000 people.
  • In Kenya, Oxfam is currently supporting 40,000 people and planning to expand the support to approximately 240,000 people with cash transfers for food and other essential items and water, sanitation and hygiene activities such as repairing water points and boreholes to provide access to clean, safe water and hygiene promotion campaigns.
  • In Ethiopia, Oxfam has supported 170,000 people in Northern Ethiopia with lifesaving clean water, food, and cash assistance, particularly in conflict affected areas in South Tigray, Central Tigray, Amhara and Afar. Oxfam aims to reach an additional 750,000 women, men and children in Northern Ethiopia with emergency food packages, livelihoods assistance, clean water, sanitation and hygiene kits and protection until March 2023. Together with our partners, we are also scaling up response in the Somali Region to respond to the effects of the drought.

BioNTech to ship mobile vaccine factory containers to Africa

Responding to the announcement that BioNTech plans to ship mobile vaccine factory containers to Africa, which could start producing vaccines in the second half of 2023, Oxfam’s Health Policy Manager, Anna Marriott, said:

“Efforts to boost vaccine manufacturing in Africa are welcome but this is a long-term project and should not distract from the failure of rich country governments and companies, including Germany and BioNTech, to tackle today’s shameful vaccine inequality responsible for millions of needless deaths in poorer countries from this pandemic.

“It is unacceptable that BioNTech, along with other pharma giants, is ignoring the World health Organisation’s mRNA Hub in Africa which is ready to produce vaccines and expand manufacturing in favour of a BioNTech controlled vaccine container module that won’t be producing vaccines for well over a year.

“To date, Germany has exported just one per cent of its vaccines to the African continent. If Germany is serious about tackling vaccine inequality it must reverse its refusal to support the waiving of intellectual property rules for these life-saving pandemic tools and insist BioNTech transfer their technology now to the WHO so that existing manufacturers across Africa, Latin America and Asia can make them.

“Serious questions must also be raised about BioNTech’s objectives with this initiative. Last week it was revealed that a consultancy on BioNTech’s payroll, the kENUP Foundation, is trying to undermine the work of a World Health Organisation and South African-led project to make mRNA COVID vaccines as a global public good and free of big pharma’s control.”

EU set to bin 25 million more vaccine doses than it has donated to Africa this year

Europe has betrayed Africa by blocking proposals which would allow manufacturers on the continent to make their own COVID-19 vaccines while hoarding millions of doses which are set to expire at the end of the month, warns the People’s Vaccine Alliance ahead of tomorrow’s meeting of African and European leaders at the AU-EU Summit.

According to new analysis from the Alliance, the EU will have to throw away 55 million doses of COVID vaccines by the end of February, many more than the 30 million doses they have donated to Africa so far in 2022.

Despite the rhetoric of a special relationship with Africa, the EU – which is now the world’s biggest exporter of vaccines – has prioritised selling vaccines made on EU soil for eye-watering prices to rich nations and just eight per cent of its vaccine exports have gone to the African continent. The figures for Germany are even worse; just one per cent of vaccine exports from BioNTech, the German pharmaceutical company behind the Pfizer vaccine, have gone to Africa.

At the same time, EU member states, led by Germany, have been a major blocker of proposals tabled by South Africa and India and supported by the African Union and over 100 countries for an intellectual property waiver which would allow the generic production of COVID vaccines, tests and treatments. Leaked drafts of the summit declaration show a divide between the EU and the AU, with the AU insisting language on the waiver is included. Last summer, French President Emmanuel Macron – who is hosting the AU-EU summit – announced his support for the waiver but has done little since to challenge the EU’s stance on the issue.

It is estimated that a quarter of a million people have died as a result of COVID-19 in Africa since the beginning of the year, almost 7,000 people a day. Due to very low vaccine supplies, just 11 per cent of people on the continent have received their first two COVID vaccines to date. The number of people who have had a booster jab in the EU outnumber those in Africa who have had two doses by more than a third. 

The People’s Vaccine Alliance, a group of nearly 100 organisations including African Alliance, Christian Aid, Oxfam, Public Services International and UNAIDS, says the EU should be held to account for the lack of vaccines in Africa, because it has stood so firmly in the way of the continent being able to produce its own doses.

Joab Okanda, Pan Africa Senior Advocacy Advisor for Christian Aid, said: “European Commission President, Ursula Von der Leyen, said at the beginning of the pandemic that the vaccine should be a global public good. Yet instead, she has ensured it is a private profit opportunity, raking in billions for Big Pharma and the EU, while almost 9 out of 10 people in Africa aren’t fully vaccinated, two years into this deadly pandemic. This is shameful.”

The EU has made much of plans to support the set-up of vaccine factories in Africa under the monopoly control of European pharmaceutical corporations – but this still wouldn’t give countries autonomy on vaccine supplies produced. BioNTech recently announced plans to produce 50 million vaccines in Africa once fully operational, however this is less than their factory in Germany produces each month.

Anna Marriott, Health Policy Manager at Oxfam, said: “Europe must stop blocking African producers from making their own doses of COVID vaccines. If there truly is a common agenda between the Unions, then the EU would stop putting the interests of pharmaceutical companies, who have reaped billions from the pandemic, ahead of African lives.

“These vaccines were publicly funded, and the recipes should be shared with the world to allow all qualified producers to make these vital shots.”

The EU have contributed €3 billion in funding to COVAX, the initiative designed to help developing countries to access vaccine doses, but the scheme has now run out of funds after failing to reach its target of vaccinating 20 per cent of people in poorer countries by the end of 2021. Meanwhile, Germany alone has received back €3.2 billion in tax revenue from BioNTech.

Sani Baba Mohammed, Public Services International Regional Secretary for Africa and Arab countries, said:  “The EU claims they are promoting a ‘prosperous partnership of equals’ with the African Union – yet they are throwing more vaccine doses in the trash than they are donating to us, while continuing to block a waiver on vaccine patents which would enable us to produce our own vaccines. What’s equal about that?

“This vaccine apartheid – perpetuated by the EU – has a brutal human cost. Our livelihoods continue to be destroyed, our economies shattered, our health workers pushed beyond the brink.

“It is encouraging that the African Union is standing up to the EU and asking for a reference to the TRIPS waiver to be included in the Summit’s outcome document. We need the TRIPS waiver now and the EU must stop standing in the way.”

 

Notes to editors:

  • In a draft declaration, the EU has said “we support a common agenda for manufacturing vaccines, medicines and health products in Africa, including investment in production capacities, the use of intellectual property, voluntary technology transfers as well as strengthening of the regulatory framework to enable equitable access to vaccines, diagnostics and therapeutics.”
  • The Africa Group is a co-sponsor of the TRIPS waiver proposal, and the African Union passed a motion at the 34th summit of the Africa Union calling for a temporary WTO waiver of intellectual property obligations to enable the manufacture and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines in Africa. See here.
  • Data on number of doses donated to Africa analysed between 1st January 2022– 8th February 2022 from Airfinity. Data that the EU has 55 million doses due to expire at the end of February 2022 also from Airfinity.
  • Vaccination rate data from Our World In Data – 151 million people are fully vaccinated in Africa and 204 million people in the EU have received boosters.
  • Just 8 per cent of EU’s vaccine exports so far this year have been to Africa. The figure for exports from Germany is 1.4 per cent and from Netherlands and Belgium the figure is 43 per cent. Data from Airfinity.
  • Estimates on number of COVID deaths in Africa are from the Economist.

Oxfam and local humanitarian partners assisting people hit by multiple cyclones in Southern Africa

Oxfam and its humanitarian partner organisations are providing humanitarian support including cash, food, clean water and sanitation to people recovering from multiple cyclones that have torn across Southern Africa in the past two weeks.

The region has been most recently rocked by Cyclone Batsirai and earlier Tropical Storm Ana. Ana alone affected over 180,000 people, killing at least 38, mostly in Zambezia, Nampula, and Tete provinces in Mozambique, flooding thousands of hectares of land and causing landslides. In Malawi, 37 people have been reported dead, 22 missing and 158 injured. Over 193,558 households (948,434 people) are affected, and 740 hectares of crops have been destroyed.

The ferocity and frequency of the storms are consistent with scientific warnings of worsening climate-related harm. Edward Thole, a Program Manager at Circle for Integrated Community Development (CICOD), one of Oxfam’s partner organisations, said that having strong climate-proof mitigation and safety measures already in place ―such as new water dykes around Bona village in Malawi― was “a life-saver”.

Margaret Kasumgwi, from Phalombe in Malawi told Oxfam: “The floods came when it was getting dark. Within minutes, water was knee high. We ran to safety leaving everything behind. Everything we had, including our food, is gone. We have no one to turn to because everyone here is affected. We are hungry.”

Justin Kumbira, a smallholder farmer from Salima village in Malawi, said he and his family had lost property to other floods over the past years: “I don’t know what else to do because every time we rebuild something, floods come and take everything. Floods have reduced us to beggars because we can’t feed ourselves now”.

“It will not be easy getting back on our feet. My field is destroyed, and crops may not make it, we have lost food we were keeping in the house, clothes gone and right now finding work is very difficult,” Kumbira said.

Oxfam in Southern Africa Programme Director, Dailes Judge said: “the increased frequency of tropical storms and other climatic shocks in the region means 88 million people across this region, that are already extremely poor as a result of inequality and two years of COVID-19, have little resilience left and their capacity to bounce back is severely constrained. This is largely due to decreased funding to emergency, recovery and long-term support to affected communities.”

For the past three years, five tropical storms have hit the Southern Africa region killing 780 people and leaving nearly 5 million people extremely vulnerable. On several occasions, the storms have been followed by dry spells and drought, perfect breeding conditions for pests such as fall armyworms that have decimated many thousands of hectares of crops.

Oxfam and partners are urgently calling for more aid to boost the humanitarian response to affected countries, build up people’s resilience building and moving into longer-term development.

 

Notes

Oxfam and partners’ humanitarian response is currently happening in Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe. To date, 3,425 people have been reached with water sanitation and hygiene, food assistance through multipurpose cash transfers and gender and safeguarding interventions.

Crisis deepening: Gordon Brown warns of unjustified “COVID-19 complacency” and $16 billion gap in vaccine and treatment regime

 “I’m not sure the world will ever forgive us” for worsening vaccine inequality and treatment of Africa “as bad as under colonial rule”, says former UK prime minister on Oxfam podcast

“People have become complacent about COVID-19. Our global (health) funds are fast running out of money. Vaccine inequity is getting worse,” said former UK prime minister Gordon Brown today.

Guesting on Oxfam’s EQUALS podcast, Brown said that “we must alert the conscience of the world” to act given the high possibility of more lethal variants “coming back to haunt even those who are fully vaccinated. We may feel safe, but we are not safe, as long as the disease can spread and mutate”.

Brown, who was appointed in 2021 as World Health Organization (WHO) Ambassador for Global Health Financing and is a member of the Club de Madrid forum of democratic former Presidents and Prime Ministers, spoke of rich countries approach to tackling COVID-19 so far as being an ethical, economic and epidemiological failure.

He warned that the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator (ACT-A) ―the WHO’s initiative to coordinate the fastest health response out of the crisis― currently has a $16 billion funding hole. Brown spoke of only “weeks” left to resolve this.

“Unless the money comes in urgently, we will not be able to fund the next stages of vaccines, treatments, testing, and even the medical oxygen and PPE needed by nurses and doctors (around the world),” he said.

Brown wants governments to take “extraordinary measures” today as it did for the 2008 global financial crash. He urged them to share the burden of funding according to their ability to pay, as they do now in funding UN peacekeeping or the World Bank or the IMF, rather than “unfair” and failing voluntary contributions. He said how the world had eradicated smallpox was a successful example.

Brown said it was “short-sighted to take such a narrow view of national self-interest” for rich countries to vaccinate only their own citizens in prolonging a mutating crisis that could cost them $5 trillion in loss of trade, economic activities, companies going bust, and jobs lost. “This will bite back even those countries that have a big vaccination program,” he said, criticizing the fact that vaccination rates in rich countries currently stand at 75 percent against 11 percent across Africa.

“We need a vaccine patent waiver and technology transfer. What’s happened in Africa is as bad as what happened under colonial rule. Africa has been deprived of vaccines but also of the ability to manufacture its own vaccines because it does not have the patents to do so.” Brown slammed the EU as “unconscionable” for taking vaccines made in South Africa late last year, at a time that Europe was 60 percent vaccinated while Africa stood at less than 3 percent. He said that the “World Trade Organization should have agreed a long time ago” the patent waiver.

Brown said that the most urgent and immediate priority in tackling COVID-19 and getting more vaccines to people especially in developing countries was money. “People are dying now ―right now― because we can’t get enough vaccines and equipment and therapeutics to them quickly enough. We have to solve the problem now, and that requires proper funding now.”

“Even now more than 70 percent of vaccines are still coming to the G20 countries which means that the other 175 countries are simply losing out. We’re in this terrible position where 60 million vaccines have already had to be destroyed in the US, Canada, the UK and the European Union,” he said. 250 million more may have to be destroyed by Easter as being past their used-by date.

Brown said that the COVID-19 response was lacking funding, coordination and leadership. “An enlightened view of self-interest” would tell rich country leaders that all people must have the chance to be vaccinated to eradicate a disease that is likely to mutate and come back to hit you, he said.

Brown also called on social grassroots movements to come together around this “big picture” of saving lives. “We have to expose the anti-vaxx lies. We have to realise that social media matters. Most of all we have to give people a bridgehead of hope and a sense of that we can change things,” he said.

“If you can work for change and hope that the world can be a better place, you can persuade people to join you. I would stress organization and education and agitation, but I would stress the importance of persuading people that the world can be a better place through engendering hope in a better future.”

Notes

The EQUALS podcast about inequality is hosted by Oxfam. Listen to the latest episode with former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

Copyright © 2024 Oxfam Aotearoa.

Oxfam is a worldwide development organisation that mobilises the power of people against injustice. Oxfam Aotearoa is a registered charity with the New Zealand Charities Register (registration CC24641). Donations are tax refundable.

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