By Cohort 4 BGFer, Tasneem
On Thursday 17th October, thanks to the help of Bright Green Future, I attended an event called "Climate Change and Hunger" in London. It was hosted by Concern Worldwide- an international humanitarian organisation.
There was a panel interview of people who work in various sectors- for example it was really interesting to see Amina Abdulla who works for Concern Worldwide in Kenya to talk about her experiences with the effects of climate change. In particular, I learnt the importance of valuing the communities' priorities (bottom-up development) rather than top-down projects which are large-scale and government-led. I am interested in the mechanisms of sustainable development and how to mitigate challenges such as climate change, because unfortunately they affect developing countries disproportionally.
My time at the event was insightful as the actions we needed to take were discussed, but more so on what governments need to do in order to reduce global hunger levels and tackle reducing crop yields. The most important ways in which we can achieve this is to use the UN's "Sustainable Development Goals" as a framework and keep temperature rise to a minimum, following The Paris Agreement.
It was intriguing to learn that only 7% of climate finance across the world is trackable so this is definitely an area of concern that should be paid more attention to. Also, another message was that we need a fairer economy to decrease food and nutrition security as developing countries contribute to 75% of the world economy but only receive 5% of it in return.
Overall the event was really useful to see how politics and economics play a role in climate change and other countries. Also, to learn more about the impacts because climate change is occurring right now and not merely a vision of the future.