Year 3, Month 7, Day 2: The Hunger Games?

USA Today’s Wendy Koch:

As leaders from more than 130 nations convene a United Nations conference on sustainable development Wednesday, new research shows how climate change will likely exacerbate a key issue: hunger.

The number of undernourished women and young children could increase 20% and affect one of every five within a decade because of climate change’s impact on food production, according to an analysis by the World Health Organization and other groups. Today, one in seven or 495 million women and children under age 5 lack sufficient food, the report says, adding population growth will worsen the problem.

Eventually they’re going to eat the rich. Sent on June 21:

The connections are obvious: more unpredictable weather means fewer predictable crops, which means more hunger, privation and misery. A mother facing a catastrophic crop failure can ill afford the luxury of pretending that the planetary greenhouse effect is a conspiracy ginned up by a liberal cabal. An undernourished child cannot silence hunger pangs with out-of-context statistics.

Furthermore, the humanitarian consequences of climate change are only part of the picture. Starvation has its own devastating geopolitical impacts, and any robust environmental policy must address them before they threaten global security. Our political paralysis in the face of this threat demonstrates once again that climate-change denial is the exclusive prerogative of the economically protected. If the wealthy power-brokers in corporate boardrooms and the halls of Congress could abandon their gourmet lunches and finally face a hungry, thirsty, malnourished world, perhaps they’d stop blocking progress towards a meaningful global agreement on climate.

Warren Senders