Women, Children Feeling Effects Of Climate Change

The lives of women and children are particularly being affected by the growing problem of climate change, a United Nations official has warned.

Deputy Resident Representative of the United Nations' Develop-ment Programme (UNDP), Akiko Fujii, has stressed that changes in weather patterns have affected the physical growth and educational status of many children.

"Climate change can have quite a huge impact on all aspects of human development. Climate change affects the entire world, whatever you do in Jamaica can affect the world, because we are living in the same planet," Fujii told the Jamaica Information Service.

Fujii pointed out that about 50 per cent of children born in Ethiopia during flood periods were likely to become malnourished.

She also noted that in India about 70 per cent of girls missed primary education during the drought in the 1990s, as it took a prolonged period for the infants to fetch firewood which had become a scarcity as a result of the change in weather cycles.

The UNDP representative commended Jamaica and the region for measures to mitigate the negative impact of climate change.

"But we have to keep in mind that once we stop our efforts, we would hamper all our achievements," she asserted.

President of the Jamaica Institute of Environmental Professionals, Marcia Creary, agreed with Fujii, noting that climate change was already affecting the livelihood of Jamaicans.

Creary said the decline in fish stock and threat to the fishing industry was one sector that had been hurt by the climate-change fallout.

"From a positive perspective, insurance companies may oblige companies or homeowners who put in place environmental safeguards to combat these changes," Creary said.

Fujii, however, emphasised that climate-change education was paramount, as the long-term significant change in the expected patterns of weather conditions was inhibiting the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals by the year 2015.