Danielle Cormack is currently in Africa for ChildFund NZ. Photo / Supplied
Danielle Cormack is currently in Africa for ChildFund NZ. Photo / Supplied
• Danielle Cormack went to Africa with Childfund NZ and Australia.
This month, 13 New Zealand aid agencies launched a campaign asking politicians to back a plan to drive down carbon emissions, the Zero Carbon Act.
More than that, they're calling on political parties to commit to steering New Zealand towards being a 100 per cent renewable, clean energy country by 2050.
The fact that this has been launched before an election is no coincidence. It's important that we know where political parties stand on the issue of climate change.
Having spent the past few weeks in drought-ravaged Kenya as an ambassador for one of the participating agencies, this call on political parties will be, for me, one of the key determinants as to who will get my vote in the upcoming election.
Just as we did when giving women the vote, or with our anti-nuclear stance in the 80s, now's the time for New Zealanders to stand tall and show ourselves as the fair, green country we keep telling ourselves we are.
Economically, too, this is a time we can turn Kiwi-can-do towards innovative solutions to create a cleaner, healthier world. Of course we can move our country towards a clean, green-energy future - but not without our leaders getting behind this drive and investing in helping us get there. And we need to know now how committed political parties are to this vision.
Climate change is real. In New Zealand and Australia, the two countries I live between, we're seeing it in more irregular weather patterns: cold when it should be warm; heat-waves out of season; torrential rains and prolonged droughts; incidences like the floods in Edgecumbe earlier this year.
And in Africa, well, there's no denying it. You're confronted with it visually - a scene of beige and grey, dust and dry, thinness and death. The rivers that once flowed with water have dried up to nothing but sand and stone.
More prevalent is the impact on the spirit of people. Drought hits with a real sense of injustice. The effects of hunger and desperation pervade generations: children who are malnourished year upon year can't develop physically or mentally as they should.
A family dig for water in a dry riverbed in Turkana, Kenya. Photo / Adam Anthony
In Turkana, in the north of Kenya, it has rained briefly only three times in the past three years (once, for all of about five minutes, while I was there). Many people haven't been able to plant or harvest crops for years and, with no way to earn an income, their search for food for their family and animals is all-consuming.
I walked for 45 minutes with a family along a dried-up river bed so they could dig down a metre or so to find water to drink. They hadn't eaten a solid nutritional meal in three days.
Lodwar elders shared stories about when they were growing up - how there were many rains, wild animals and wild fruit everywhere. Droughts used to come only every five to 10 years, and they could rely on the long rains [from March to May] and short rains [from October to December]. But today things have changed completely. The droughts come one upon another, giving no time to recover and rebuild stocks, so resilience is low.
One of the Childfund Turkana field officers I have been working with, Isaac Email Iriam, 36, deals daily with those most affected by drought. He identifies industrialisation, deforestation and air pollution as the causes of climate change.
From this part of Africa, where there is little industry, few cars and hardly any roads, I asked him what message he would send to the world, if he could.
"I would tell people that if they are doing industry, then please do it sensitively towards others. Ask themselves, 'How are we going to affect other people?' To not think about your impact on others is simply inhumane."
The people I met in northern Kenya and in northern Uganda live hand-to-mouth at the best of times. But in times of drought, their desperation is exacerbated.
To me, there is no doubt the impact of emissions from our carbon-fuelled world is pushing poor people further into poverty.
Though we've have made significant gains in the fight against poverty in the past 60 years, climate change threatens to reverse all those gains. And "inhumane" is not a name I'd ever want conferred on me. We need to look at how we can make New Zealand a 100 per cent renewable, clean energy country by 2050.
In the lead-up to the election, we need political parties to tell us where they stand on this.
