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NY Climate March Shines Spotlight On World Food Security

Protesters marching down 42nd street in Manhattan

An estimated 310,000 thousand people marched in downtown New York on Sunday, the largest ever public show of force from people demanding that the U.S. and other governments take stronger action against emissions that raise global temperatures.

It's not a coincidence that the People's Climate March comes just two days before a climate summit at the United Nations this week. The meeting, in which president Obama is expected to speak, is a planning session to begin hammering out a possible global agreement on emissions that could come up for consideration in Paris next year.

Floats, giant puppets, drummers and marching bands joined the ranks as protesters marched the 2-mile route. Author and environmental activist Bill McKibben, a key organizer who founded 350.org, called the ruckus a "burglar alarm against those who are stealing our future."

Earlier this month, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that this year brought the hottest summer across the globe that has ever been recorded.

During a separate rally a day before the march, McKibben said warming temperatures, droughts and shifting rainfall already threaten food security in vulnerable areas such as Africa.

"The trouble we've seen so far comes from increasing the temperature one degree Celsius, that's how much it's gone up so far. In our current way of doing things, we are on track to send that temperature up four or five degrees Celsius in the course of this century," he said. "If we do that, we can't have civilizations like the ones we've known. There's just no possibility to even grow the food to support them."

Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and the United Nations Special Envoy for Climate Change, said she began to hear from farmers in Africa more than ten years ago that conditions were worsening. "‘We no longer know when the rainy seasons will come. We used to have seasons where we could plant and harvest. Now we have long periods of drought, and then flooding.'" She recalls hearing farmers say. "I began to realize that this was the biggest human rights issue. I became aware that we were moving inexorably toward a terrible catastrophe."

Donald Brown, a scholar-in-residence at Widener University's school of law, said arguments over emission reduction targets, such as the White House proposal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, do not take responsibility for harm from rising temperatures around the world.

"It is already destroying food supplies, particularly in some parts of some parts of the world, particularly in Africa. Access to water is diminishing," he said. "We debate it as if only U.S. interests count. It's a moral monstrosity not to consider our impacts on food in other parts of the world."

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