Paris Floods and Climate Change

When museums closed early for the day (including Orsay museum and Louvre), on a recent trip to Paris, the prime minister of France had declared the reason: Precautions had to be taken incase the museums' precious artworks flooded by the overflowing of the river Siene, due to climate change.

According to the Huffington Post 'Heavy rain in central Europe has left 14 people dead, forced thousands from their homes and forced the Louvre museum to close to protect its priceless paintings'. Climate change can be so easy to forget until you experience the smallest of impacts. As Naomi Klein states, we forget and then remember again...oh yeah climate change is happening. We suffer from this 'ecological amnesia', perhaps feeling that the issue of climate change is too abstract or distant to worry about or have the power to do anything about.

As a result of 'ecological amnesia', climate change keeps being put on the back burner, as it develops and takes its cause, locally and internationally. Unfortunately, it is also those countries that emit no or little CO2 that have to bare the brunt of climate change; in the form of droughts (African states), floods(Bangladesh) and storms (Philippines, Madagascar.) Bhutan on the other hand is the only country in the world that is carbon negative, sucking up 3 times the CO2 emissions its people produce, and yet it suffers from heavy rainfall / landslides due to the climate impact caused by other countries - namely China, India, America, Russia and Japan to name the top five. Although China and India also suffer tremendously from floods.

My interest in climate change revolves around how 2 degrees could affect climate refugees from disappearing and those affected by climate related disease, economic loss and destruction with consequential and significant ethical issues of justice and responsibility across individuals, populations and environment. To what level are the people in one country accountable for the well-being of people in another country?