Shining a light from West Cork to Rajasthan on the Worlds Poorest Communities

This past week Partnership for Change, a Cork based low carbon and climate change initative received notification from India that the community based, sustainable energy and lighting project it sponsored through the support of West Cork based EnviroManagement Services and Bord Gais was successfully completed.

As we turn the clocks back and darkness desends earlier for the winter months it is a little easier to imagine what life must be like for those that have no access to artificial light or electricity. We have travelled light years technologically since the days when our homes, towns and villages were in darkness after nightfall, save for oil lamps and candles. The daily illumination of our homes is something we take for granted until there is an unwelcome power outage resulting in an interruption to our energy-fuelled lives or indeed until we read about the unfortnate incidences of households in Ireland now being disconnected because they cant pay their utility bills.

It is hard to believe that there are still over 1.6 billion people around the world who do not have access to electricity and are thrown into darkness as soon as daylight fades. Access to electric lighting allows people to illuminate their environment, providing them with artificial light so that they can undertake basic tasks, like cooking, reading, and household chores. It allows children to study, reducing poverty and provides basic human needs within the household. In instances of no access to electricity many people are forced to light and heat their homes with kerosene lamps. The World Bank has found that burning kerosene indoors to be equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. It is estimated that almost one billion women and children are breathing in kerosene on a daily basis. Continued use of these lamps can cause infection of the lungs or eyes as well as respiratory problems. In addition to the significant health risk of the fumes, fires can also erupt when a lamp is knocked over or when household items or clothes are exposed to the flame.

It was to help tackle this that Partnership for Change supported the ‘Lighting a Billion Lives’ (LABL) campaign founded by TERI, The Energy and Resources Initiative, based in India. The LABL campaign aims to bring light into the lives of a billion people across the globe who don’t have access to articifical light or electricity.

In support of TERI’s campaign, Partnership for Change organised a major international climate change conference in Cork in November 2008 through which the proceeds have now directly benefitted the lives of 250 people in a village in Rajasthan in rural India. Proceeds from the conference went to two other charities as well as the ‘Lighting a Billion Lives’ campaign.

This Climate Change Conference supported by some of Ireland’s leading companies was the largest and most significant conference on the topic of climate change ever to have been held in this country, hosting international experts from the field of climate change science. Appropriately, Partnership for Change, which was founded by Bandon-based environmental scientist and consultant Mr. Declan Waugh, committed to making the conference as carbon-neutral as possible. Driven by this objective, some of the international experts who addressed the conference did so remotely by live video confereencing which was sponsored by BT. Both Dr James Hansen, the Director of NASA’s Goddard Space Institute and leading world climate change expert, as well as Dr.Vicky Pope, the Director of the British Hadley Centre for Meteorology and Head of Climate Change for the UK Government, spoke to the conference by live-video link up from America and England respectively. Both speakers took questions from the delegates at the Cork-based conference following their lives addresses. Questions and answers flew back and forth between Ireland, the USA and England at what seemed the speed of light. This cutting-edge technological element to the conference which brought world leaders in the field of climate change science to Cork city added greatly to the ‘energy’ and excitement levels on the day not to mention the reduction in the carbon foot-print of the Climate Change Conference.

The third speaker to address the conference delegates remotely was the Chairman of the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr.R.K Pachauri, who also founded TERI.

Over the last two years, the TERI campaign using renewable solar powered energy sources around has illuminated 30,000 households spread over 550 villages across 15 states in India. Work on the village of Balesar in the state of Rajasthan was funded entirely by Partnership for Change has now been completed. The project involved establishing within the community a solar powered co-operative, managed by the women of the village and providing the funding to install the solar power technology. The project also trained the co-operative members and providing recharagable lamps to every household in the village. It benefitted 250 people within the village directly and created one full time green job in the village.

Founder of Partnership for Change, Declan Waugh says that “knowing that so many people, especially women and children have benefitted from the provision of clean renewable energy light sources to their rural village in India is very rewarding. It will increase the standard of living of the villagers and make a real difference to their everyday lives while also supporting and creating sustainable green jobs in rural communities.”

Other charities which benefitted from the proceeds of the conference included Water Aid and Médecins San Frontieres, both organisations that assist populations that are being affected daily by the impacts of climate change and humanitarian crises around the globe including most recently the earthquake in Haite and the catastrophic floods in Pakistan.

Charity Event to raise funds for humanitarian relief in Pakistan

The floods of November 19th 2009 in Ireland were the most devastating recorded in over two hundred and fifty years. Prior to this the most destructive floods that impacted on Ireland was the tsunami that hit the Irish coast in the aftermath of the 1755 Great Lisbon Earthquake.

Ireland had to wait 250 yrs for a second major natural disaster. In between we suffered the Great Famine of 1845-52. The people who provided the most effective help to the Irish during this catastrophe were members of the Society of Friends, or Quakers, from America who provided food, mostly American flour, rice, biscuits and Indian meal. Their efforts were widely supported in America not least from the Choctaws native America tribes.
This is extraordinary given that it was an Irish America President, President Andrew Jackson (whose parents emigrated from Antrim in northern Ireland) who in 1831 seized the fertile who lands of the Choctaws native American Indian tribes in Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisiana forcing them to relocate to Indian reservations in a journey that became know as the “Trail of Tears”.

Of about 20,000 Choctaws who started the journey, more than half perished from exposure, malnutrition, and disease. Despite this in 1847, the Indians of the Choctaw nation moved by news of starvation in Ireland and in recognition of the similarities between their own experiences and those of the Irish with loss of property, forced migration and exile, mass starvation, and cultural suppression, the Choctaw raised the equivalent of €120,000 in today’s currency for a famine relief fund for Ireland.

This extraordinary gift from a people who were themselves impoverished has never been forgotten.

Today it is the people Pakistan that are suffering a humanitarian crisis of unimaginable scale. According to the UN the number of people suffering is double the combined total of the 2004 Indian ocean tsunami, the 2005 Kashmir earthquake and the 2010 Haite earthquake. The total number of people affected in the three other disasters is about 11 million. The total number affected by the recent floods in Pakistan is 20 million.

The floods devastated the already flimsy public health system destroying hundreds of clinics. 30,000 women health workers, the backbone of the community health system were made homeless alone. The floods inundated an area more than twice the size of Ireland, crippling Pakistan’s agriculture and its economy. The waters swept away 2.4m hectares (6m acres) of crops – fruit, wheat, cotton, rice – while 1.2 million large animals, such as cattle, below, and 6 million poultry have perished. In the cities, food prices have soared, raising already high inflation. And the floods wiped out the equivalent of 2m bales of cotton, a costly blow to the £12bn textile industry, which employs 10 million.

Two years ago I met Ayesha Siddiqi, a young highly educated Pakistan graduate at a climate change conference. We discussed emergency planning and relief in light of the implications of climate change and how extreme weather events may affect humanity in the years ahead. Little did I know that within two years both our countries would be hit by natural disasters as a result of extreme weather. Our towns and cities have largely been rebuilt, nobody perished in the floods, we have survived one catastrophe to witness another economic crisis. But this pails into insignificance to what the people of Pakistan are currently experiencing. The earthquake that hit northern Pakistan in 2005 killed 85,000 people, a large percentage children and made more than 3million homeless with more than 1000 hospitals destroyed. Now less than five years later they are suffering the worst humanitarian crisis to befall a nation in modern times.

Ayesha is currently working with Karachi Relief a Pakistan Disaster Management Voluntary Organization supported by civic minded volunteers. She contacted me recently appealing for help. They have set up camps in some of the worst affected areas and are providing support in food sanitation, shelter, medical supplies and clean drinking water. The organisation is entirely run and managed by unpaid professionals like Ayesha, volunteering their time and resources in an attempt to make a difference.

Last year Bandon Film society screened a charity film to raise funds for the Bandon flood relief. Next Friday the 15th October we will be screening the acclaimed 1931 film Dracula in St Peters Church Bandon at 9pm with the renowned composer Dr Eric Sweeney. Eric is returning by popular demand to Bandon following his sell out performance last year at Phantom of the Opera where he will again be performing an original score and sound for the film on the church organ. All proceeds from the event are being donated to the Karachi Relief Trust in Pakistan. Tickets are €10. Please support.