Preliminary Thoughts on the Implications of Global Climate Change for Microfinance

Scientists – and, increasingly, politicians, business leaders, and the general public – are convinced that global climate change is a crisis that will touch practically every other human enterprise. Climate change presents such a threat to all nations and people that it may become the defining event of the 21st Century, the one against which all other activities will be measured. The Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change estimated that we have no more than ten to fifteen years to stabilize and begin to reduce carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere, failing which, there are likely to be highly adverse effects that will touch nearly everyone. Those effects include massive loss of arable land to drought, accelerating species loss, increasingly severe weather anomalies, new invasive human diseases, and sea level rises. Stern reports that, according to one estimate, 200 million people may become permanently displaced by read more…