The Human Cost of Climate Change

Sense of Home is Incredibly Important

It’s something that people need. Belonging offers comfort and security even in troubling times. When this stability is taken (or not even obtained) it comes with an enormous cost to a person’s wellbeing. As global warming increases due to climate change, as do natural disasters; droughts, storms, floods and hurricanes all accelerate in frequency and intensity and with that comes a human cost. Communities, livelihoods, homes and actual lives are all decimated as result. Data from the Centre of Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters from last year (2018) concluded that nearly 29 million needed emergency assistance or humanitarian aid due to natural disasters that year. This is people who have had their homes and lives torn apart by the very ecosystem that sustains us. That is one part of the human cost of climate change.

Caring About Climate Change (and the Human Cost)

It’s not in opposition to human interests. This is not a case of choosing nature or the planet over humanity. Sometimes, the conservative-minded would like to present it this way. They’re wrong. Industrialism and expansionism has taken us as a species far but we haven’t taken into consideration the cost. A balance had to be found and it wasn’t. Now, we have homes that are inefficient, landfills that accelerate global warming and leave land uninhabitable and oceans of plastic. We have made mistakes that are eradicating life on the planet but destabilising the ecosystem that regulates the livability of our world.

It is clear to me that environmentalism and awareness of global warming is actually very much in humanity’s best interest. If you don’t care for the natural world, then this is at least a factor to consider. Caring about climate change, is caring about the people (and all other life) you share the planet with and we only have a decade to deal with it!

Zero Waste Week 2019

Encouraged us to look at climate change. Ambassadors, participants, businesses and fellow zero-wasters took time to look at fashion, landfills, food waste and the bathroom waste (among other things) from a climate change lens. The message was very clear; that given the information that came out at the end of 2018 (and beginning of 2019) we need to get on top of this.

Whist I appreciate that not everyone will have the same passion as I do for the natural world, I hope that many at least have compassion for the people suffering in it. If not, there isn’t much I can do for you.

Personally, I see zero waste efforts as a betterment not just for the world, or for nature but for all the people in it. I hope you do too because the ecological cost of not is too high but so is the human cost.

We shouldn’t keep paying it.

The Busy Papa

Also known as Aaron, The Busy Papa focuses on lifestyle, parenting and personal wellbeing content. He has two decades experience in creative writing (including several published poems) and strongly dislikes (though tolerates) tomatoes.