From a climate change conference in Edinburgh come two perspectives on the impact of global warming on water supplies. In Tanzania, droughts that would happen once a decade now come every four or five years. In India, the retreat of Himalayan glaciers such as the Gangroti are creating glacial lakes that increase the chance of flash flooding in the monsoon season.
Africa and climate change are the two issues at the top of the Gleneagles G8 agenda, but the latter often gets overlooked at the expense of the former. But the point of many of the speakers here is that African development is impossible without some form of action on climate change.
Archbishop Donald Mtelemela, from Tanzania, tells the audience that drought equals failed crops. In Africa, where small-scale, and often un-irrigated, farms are the dominant form of agriculture and provide employment for 70% of people, the impact of rainfall is too easy to see.
"To be without rain is like being denied oxygen," he tells the audience, explaining that people who spend their days walking miles for food and water can do no other work; that people who cannot wash their eyes with clean water when the wells dry up are more likely to develop glaucoma; there is a rise in the numbers of children under five dying from malnutrition.
Samrat Sengupta, of World Wildlife Fund India, concentrates on the consequence of too much water, where rising sea levels off India's east coast are submerging islands in the Sundarbans, a mangrove area home to 4 million people, and turning the drinking water salty.
A report from the conference's organisers,the Working Group on Climate Change and Development, a coalition of 18 NGOs working in either environmental matters or development, recommends that rich nations cut their greenhouse gas emissions, but also that development takes account of poor communities' increasing vulnerability to climate change. It points out that every $1 spent preparing for a disaster saves $7 in the cost of recovering from it. But, as was the case in Mozambique before the floods there, requests for funds to prepare for such a disaster went unheeded.
All these factors call for a new model of development in which strategies to increase human resilience in the face of climate change and the stability of ecosystems are central. It calls for a test on every policy and project, in which the key question will be, "Are you increasing or decreasing people's vulnerability to the climate?"
Rebecca Musyoka, a speaker for Kenya, argues that excessive wet seasons in parts of the country are making it difficult to collect firewood; what is needed there are micro hydro schemes. But this will not be the same everywhere. In drought-hit parts of Tanzania, explains Archbishop Mtelemela, a reliance on hydro-electric schemes means the people are more vulnerable as electricity supplies falter.
Dealing with climate change - by both curbing it and coping with it - does not need to be seen as the "other issue" on the G8 agenda. "Making poverty history without an effort to curb climate change is just futile - the two are inseperable," says Archbishop Mtelemela.
