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Can we break An Inextricable link?
Speaking on the BBC ‘Today’ programme are on the verge of starvation. In
on New Year's Eve Jane Goodall, a Afghanistan, since the Taliban took over
primatologist and anthropologist, again, children are eating locusts and soil,
reinforced what many, including food is scarce and where it is available
Archbishop Rowan Williams, have been many families cannot afford to buy it.
saying for years - climate change and This quick ‘world tour’ serves, I hope, to
poverty are inextricably linked. In East demonstrate how poverty and climate
Africa, for example, people cut down change are not only linked but
swathes of forest to make charcoal, experienced universally. Human actions
build houses, sell the wood, use it for increasingly play a part, not least through
cooking or use the cleared ground to national and international conflicts.
grow vegetables, in the
process disrupting It is easy to throw up
photosynthesis and our hands in horror
increasing the and despair, to ask what
likelihood of flooding, in can we do about it. But
its turn affecting the our New Year
availability of food. resolution should be
not to feel defeated,
In December 2021 the instead reasserting a
UN warned of a determination to do
skyrocketing need for something about it –
humanitarian aid either by personal
worldwide as the actions (don’t leave
pandemic continued to taps running, switch off
rage and climate change and inter lights when not needed etc) or by
(national) conflicts left countries on the contributing to the efforts of Christian
brink of famine. A Christian Aid report Aid and other aid agencies. Every
identified ten extreme weather events change begins with a first step, however
that caused more than $1.8B of damage little. As we pray for those involved ‘on
in 2021, bringing misery to millions the ground’, we can help through our
around the world. Hurricane Ida hit the generosity and our time. Thank you all
southern USA, Jamaica, the Cayman for your amazing responses to our
Islands, Venezuela and Colombia. In appeals - be assured that they do make a
Bangladesh floods and cyclones are difference.
nothing new but, as the CEO of
Practical Action stressed, their intensity Covid restrictions permitting, Lent
and frequency have increased lunches begin on Friday 4 March and
significantly. St Laurence’s will be hosting on 18
March – so that's our Friday lunches in
Yemen, one of the Arab world's poorest March and part of April sorted.
communities, has been devastated by
civil war and over 50% of the population Claire Wilcox
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