Although many of us know that water is a scarce resource in our world, few people know that more than 5,000 children under the age of 5 die each day due to lack of access to clean and safe drinking water.

That’s nearly 2 million children each year. On World Water Day, we need to remember these children and their families. Although I have worked in healthcare for more than 30 years, I didn’t know the depth of the crisis of poor sanitation and dangerous water. I was shocked at these statistics when I came to the US Coalition for Child Survival in 2006.

In 2005, I paid a visit to the Children’s Hospital in Kabul, Afghanistan. Afghanistan has one of the worst infant, child and maternal mortality statistics in the developing world. Although improvements have been made in the last few years, there continues to be a crisis there. When I visited Children’s Hospital of Kabul, I found that each day nearly 1,000 children come to the clinic seeking help. The hospital, at that time, didn’t have clean water or working sanitation. Babies were sharing incubators and the food was horrible. Many children showed up due to malnutrition, dehydration and illnesses related to unsafe drinking water.

Statements by Antonio Hill, senior climate change policy advisor, the international development agency Oxfam, on the United Nations Climate Change Conference that has ended today in Bali, Indonesia.

“Bali has for the first time drawn up a roadmap for all countries to tackle climate change. But a handful of powerful countries have relegated the overwhelming scientific evidence to a footnote. The Bush Administration—dragging Canada, Japan and Russia in tow—has thrown away the compass and is trying to force us all to take the journey in a gas-guzzling 4×4, not the solar-powered speedster that the world urgently needs.”

“The Bali result sets the stage for addressing fairness—all countries will have to limit emissions. But rich countries will have to kick the carbon habit first and poor countries need to see them do it. A door has been held opened for the US to join. The danger is that developing countries will be forced through the same door.”

“Without a clear range for the global emissions cuts needed, this deal fails to keep us from the brink of exceeding 2°C of warming. Far from the negotiating halls of Bali, poor people waist-high in floods and children malnourished by failed harvests will demand to know, why did world leaders not see what we face and act urgently to stop it?”

“This outcome is a clear call to the citizens of the United States, Canada, Japan and Russia. Demand more. Only you can push your governments to deliver justice for poor people facing the next drought, flood or cyclone.”

“Developing countries came to Bali ready to talk, willing to listen, but also demanding to be heard. A handful of the richest nations—led by the Bush Administration—have rebuffed their will and sapped the strength of what Bali had to offer. It’s a deep insult to the world’s poorest people.”

“All the countries of the world are now united around delivering the Bali Roadmap by 2009, despite repeated US moves to hollow out these talks. But the level of ambition in the agreement still does not match the urgent need. The cost of not going far enough will be felt a long way from the air-conditioned halls of this luxury hotel. It will be paid in poor countries, by women and men forced to reap the failed harvests of our collective inaction.”

On Adaptation:

“At long last the UN climate talks have started to grapple with the devastating impacts climate change is already having on the world’s poorest people. Coping with these impacts comes at a price that rich polluters must pay. Under pressure from developing countries, Bali has delivered clear progress: a fund for adaptation is now in place and all countries agree that more money must be raised. But with estimated costs exceeding $50 billion annually, we now need to see rich countries put some serious money forward.”

With just three days left to the conference closes, Oxfam blitzed delegates at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, with a special photographic exhibition and calendar called “It’s up to UNow”.

The photos, are messages from people in developing countries, who are already having to adapt and live with the impacts of climate change, as well as people from rich countries, who are taking personal action to reduce their contribution to climate change. Take a look at all of the photo messages on our Flickr profile.

Today, they are coming together to send a clear message to delegates at this conference, to do all they can to ensure that the interests of people living in poverty are put at the heart of any decisions and outcomes from Bali.

Bali is beautiful. This small tropical island, part of the Indonesian archipelago and perched off the East coast of Java is, for the next two weeks, playing host to a major UN climate change conference.

I am here for the first week of the conference with colleagues from the Global Call to Action Against Poverty – the world’s largest anti-poverty movement, with national platforms in more than 100 countries. I will try to send updates from the conference looking at both what is being discussed – but also to give a flavour of the conference itself.

There is no longer serious debate that humans are causing significant climatic changes, and that the poorest nations and people in the world are being hit first and hardest by these changes. So can Bali be the moment when negotiations truly begin on a crucial follow up to the Kyoto Protocol as well as on other vital areas including adaptation and deforestation.

My initial impression is, perhaps unhelpful, maybe. Let me explain.

First the conference itself. Planes carrying delegates (the irony is lost on few) come down low over the narrow strip of water that separates the island from Java, and land at Denpasar on the South tip of Bali. Those delegates are whisked away in gas-guzzling people carriers to the exclusive resort of Nusa Dua, home to countless five star hotels and to the main convention centre where the meeting will take place.
 
In luxurious surroundings, and under the hot Balinese sun, delegates waft from hotel to conference centre in taxis, bell boys carry suitcases into air-conditioned rooms, talk is of clause 4 of this and article 15 of that, Balinese security guards and police patrol the boundaries, and locals are kept firmly out. In such surroundings I fear the emergency of climate change is lost. Radical action suppressed by freshly fluffed pillows.
 
And yet, around 12,000 government officials, civil society activists, UN staff, private sector representatives and others are arriving over the weekend for the 13th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and there are, perhaps, a few important features that distinguish this meeting from its predecessors and give hope that decisions can be made.

The unity of dialogue, the role of civil society, and the timing of the conference are all playing a role to ensure that this conference is definitive in shaping global decisions.
 
Having recently been at the World Bank and IMF annual meetings, it is already clear that civil society is far more integrated into the process here than at the Bank and Fund. Here the negotiation halls are open to all accredited delegates, the civil society forum is running parallel to the main conference and dialogue is free and open between all sides.  This is highly significant as it means that decisions reached will have been done so in a relatively transparent manner and are therefore more likely to have the support of all key actors.
 
Not unrelated is the fact that this conference is historic in the unity role players are facing in the debate.  While in many areas of economics and politics, different interest groups are brought to the discussion table largely to protect their own interests in a largely zero sum game, with climate change, business, government, and civil society stand to lose, and lose in a drastic way, if there is not unified, quick action.
 
Finally, the timing of this conference is working in its favour.  The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has become a widely accepted body for scientific evidence on climate change allowing a vital agreed basis for dialogue on agreements and future treaties. It’s fourth assessment report released this year highlights the need for drastic action in the most startling terms yet.
The ravages of climate change are already being felt, from Bangladesh to New Orleans. There is now widespread public awareness about climate change, and the more it is affecting the lives of citizens, the more they are demanding action from decision makers.  With a political incentive to act together against climate change, Bali could just be the place where promises are finally turned into action.

For the sake of all of us, let’s hope so.

Earlier this week, the UNDP published its annual Human Development Report (HDR). This year, the research focused on one global concern - and the seventh Millennium Development Goal: climate change and environmental sustainability.

Released a week before the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, the report gathers a wide variety of data, which reveals that the global warming trend will not cease unless or until decisions makers take global joint actions.

The report states that these actions must be led by the richest countries, as it is only through examples and setting up partnerships programs with the poorest countries that we can hope to improve the situation in the near future. "Working together with resolve, we can win the battle against climate change. Allowing the window of opportunity to close would represent a moral and political failure without precedent in human history" said Kevin Watkins, the lead author.

Oxfam is just one of the 35 development and environment organisations, who have worked together to produce “Up in Smoke” - a series of reports looking at the impacts of Climate Change on development.  The fifth report in the series has just been launched, with a foreword from R K Pachauri, PH.D, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and focuses on the Asia Pacific region.

 Countries in this region make up 60 percent of the world’s population, half of which live near coastal areas, making them very vulnerable to rises in the sea levels and other changes in climate. The report shows that the impacts of Climate Change are not just limited to the environment, but also have the capacity to reverse the gains, that many countries in the region have made in reducing poverty. Whilst looking at the challenges faced in the Asia-Pacific region, “Up in Smoke? Asia-Pacific” also looks at the positive measures being taken by governments, civil society and the public, to reduce the causes of climate change and to overcome its effects.

We all agree. Climate change is real, and we humans are its chief cause. Yet even now, few people fully understand the gravity of the threat, or its immediacy.

Certainly I did not. It was only after I took a recent fact-finding "eco tour" of vulnerable regions that I realized the true magnitude of the danger. I have always considered global warming to be a matter of utmost urgency. Now I believe we are on the verge of a catastrophe if we do not act.

Last week, in Antarctica, I saw extraordinarily dramatic landscapes, rare and wonderful. It was the most vivid experience of my life. Yet it was deeply disturbing, as well, for I could see this world changing. The age-old ice is melting, far faster than we think.

You have heard how the famous Larsen ice shelf collapsed and disappeared five years ago. A giant slab of ice 87-kilometers long - the size of some small countries - vanished in less than three weeks. What if this "Larsen effect" were to repeat itself on a vastly greater scale?

At the Chilean research base on King George Island, scientists told me that the entire West Antarctic Ice Sheet is at risk. Like Larsen, it is a continuous sheath of floating ice, comprising nearly one-fifth of the continent.

If it broke up, sea levels could rise by six meters. Think of the effect on the coastlines and cities: New York, Mumbai and Shanghai, not to mention small island nations. It may not happen for 100 years - or it could happen in 10. We simply do not know. But when it happens, it could occur quickly, almost overnight.

It sounds like the script of a disaster movie. But this is science, not science-fiction.

Dr. Gino Casassa, a leading Chilean glaciologist with the Chilean Center for Scientific Studies and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that recently shared a Nobel Prize, worries particularly about the Antarctic Peninsula - a finger of land on the northern coast that he designates as one of three global "hot spots," along with Central Asia and Greenland.

Temperatures there are rising 10 times faster than the global average, he has found. Glaciers are visibly retreating. Grasses are taking root in Antarctica's barren soil, including one used on American golf courses. In the summer, it rains rather than snows increasingly often. A decade ago, Dr. Casassa was a skeptic on climate change. Today, he fears a calamity.

I am not scare-mongering. But I believe we are nearing a tipping point. These are signs. I saw them everywhere I visited.

In Chile, researchers told me that roughly half of the 120 glaciers they monitor are shrinking, at rates twice as fast as a decade or two ago. These include the glaciers in the mountains outside the capital, Santiago, that provide fresh water for six million residents. To the north, increasing drought threatens the country's mining industry, a mainstay of the economy, as well as agriculture and hydroelectric power.

I spent a day in perhaps the world's most magnificent national park, Torres del Paine. Like Antarctica, it was beautiful, pristine and majestic - and equally troubling. The snows of the Andes are also melting faster than we think. I flew over Grey glacier, a virtual ice sea framed by towering alpine peaks. In 1985, it retreated a full three kilometers in little more than two weeks. Yet another demonstration of the abrupt, unpredictable and potentially devastating Larsen effect.

I ended my travels under a great Samaumeira tree on the island of Combu, not far from Belem in the Amazon river delta. This was the heart of the fabled "lungs of the earth," the tropical rain forest prey to the de-forestation and land degradation that accounts for an estimated 21 percent of global carbon emissions.

Scientists say that climate change could turn the eastern Amazon into savannah within decades. My own itinerary had to be changed at the last moment because a tributary of the Amazon I planned to visit, near the port of Santarem, had run dry from drought.

All this might have been discouraging. Yet I left Brazil immensely heartened. Largely unnoticed by the rest of the world, Brazil has transformed itself into a quiet green giant - a leader in the fight against global warming. Over the past two years, it has cut deforestation in the Amazon by half. Vast tracts of jungle have been placed under federal protection.

In Brasilia, President Luis Inácio Lula da Silva assured me that the Amazon and its immense treasure chest of biodiversity was the common heritage of mankind and would be preserved. Brazil leads the world in renewable energy. It is one of only a few nations to successfully produce biofuels on a large scale. Yes, controversy surrounds the program. Some fear that land currently used to grow food will be converted to fuel. Others worry that forests will be cut to make way for biomass plantations.

It is up to governments to balance social costs and benefits. But the important point is that Brazil is acting. Its efforts to combat global warming are worth watching, as lessons for us all.

For too long, we have underestimated the urgency of climate change. It is time to wake up. Last month, the UN Environment Program released its GEO-4 report, calling for "drastic steps" in the face of a challenge that "may threaten humanity's survival." This weekend in Valencia, Spain, I will present the latest synthesis report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It is sobering reading.

Yet its conclusions are encouraging. The over-arching message: we can beat this. There are real and affordable ways to deal with climate change.

A report last week from the International Energy Agency was also cautiously upbeat. Global energy demand is rising more quickly than most estimates suggest - increasing 57 percent by 2030, according to IEA projections. But the amount of power generated by renewable sources, excluding hydroelectric, is expected to grow five-fold or more. As we see almost daily in the financial news, global business is going "green" in a big way.

All this sets the stage for the critical UN Climate Change Summit in Bali two weeks from now. We need a break-through: an agreement to launch serious negotiations for a comprehensive climate change deal that all nations can embrace. The challenge will be to lay out an achievable agenda of issues, from transferring alternative energy technologies to helping developing nations finance their own programs for fighting and adapting to climate change.

We are all responsible for this. Climate change respects no borders; solutions must be global.

Ban Ki Moon is the secretary general of the United Nations.

The effects of climate change are already being felt in some of the world’s poorest countries. Charlotte Sterrett, Oxfam Australia Southern Africa Program Officer, recently travelled to South Africa to see the impacts first-hand.

Thandi lifts up a handful of soil and watches as it disappears through her hands. Once rich and fertile and capable of producing bountiful crops, the soil is now bone dry.

“The ground used to be soft and easy to dig by hand; water was freely available just under the surface and food was plentiful; there was a lake nearby that provided fish for us to eat,” Thandi says. “But now the land is dry and hard and there is no water under the surface; even the lake has dried up.”

Thandi sits with a group of men and women under the shade of a large tree in Hluhluwe, a small town in KwaZulu-Natal province in the north-eastern corner of South Africa. Hluhluwe is a poor community struggling to contend with eight years of drought, high unemployment, rising poverty and some of the highest malaria and HIV rates in the country. Now, after years of fighting for access to adequate health care, food, clean water and sanitation and striving to reduce the effects of HIV and AIDS and conflict, the Hhuhluwe community is facing another battle — climate change.

This is what has brought me here. Oxfam Australia works with 10 partners in UMKhanyakude to help communities with high levels of HIV grow and obtain enough food to eat. While largely unaware of the term ‘climate change’, the local communities are concerned about the effects of prolonged drought and extremely low rainfall on their crops.

Understanding climate change

Hluhluwe is one of six communities I am visiting in UMKhanyakude to get a better understanding about the effects of climate change here — what impact it is having, what communities know about it and how they are adapting to it.

Climate change is an area of work Oxfam will be placing a greater focus on in coming years. The findings from this research in Hluhluwe will be incorporated into our current projects in UMKhanyakude and be shared with partners and Oxfam affiliates across the Southern African region.

As I talk with the men and women of Hluhluwe, the conversation quickly turns to the weather and how it has changed in the past 50 years. “The weather is much hotter and drier and more humid,” says one. “We can’t tell as much difference between summer and winter anymore,” says another. “We used to talk about when the drought would end; now we are thinking that maybe it is not going to end,” says another. “I don’t see how things are going to get better.”

Although the people of Hluhluwe have experienced droughts and floods for as long as they can remember, since the mid-1990s they have noticed a gradual drying of the land.

The ground was once so lush that people could use their hands to dig for water just below the surface. But those times have long gone. Even the rainwater tanks that were installed as a solution now stand dry. The local council sends a truck to fill up the tanks, but there is no delivery schedule, nor any guarantee the truck will return. While we are there a truck comes, but is only able to half-fill one tank. This water will only last a week or so.

Eco-bloggers multiplying like bunnies; bamboo (the new eco-correct fiber) in nearly everything money can buy; Leo DiCaprio succeeding Al Gore as this year's big screen prophet of global warming. With all this latest attention to green, you'd be forgiven for thinking that environmental concerns have finally seeped into the consciousness of everyday America.

I'm not so sure.

Environmental issues, particularly global warming, might be showing up in spheres as seemingly unlikely as corporate boardrooms and shareholder meetings, and the Evangelical Christian movement. But they haven't been much in evidence at this year's umpty-ten presidential candidate forums and debates. Historically, environmental issues are non-starters in presidential campaign politics, falling well below issues like the economy and national security in voter's concerns. So if the candidates are not talking about climate change now, over a year before the election, it's unlikely to become a central issue next year when the campaign is underway in earnest.

“Even if we have to put them in the corridors or under a tree, or in a rented house, all five-year old children must register for school this year” said education minister of the Dominican Republic, Alejandrina Germán in Dominican Today.

She said that the government is committed to enrolling all children as part of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, which state that all countries should achieve universal primary education by 2015.

She said that she hoped that all parents would send their children to school on August 21st because the ministry of education had made efforts to ensure that schools were ready to receive them.