Climate change, vulnerability and adaptation: case study of the Pygmies and Mbororos peoples

Abstract

Climate change is at the heart of discussions to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of 2030. Like the COP 21 held in 2015 in France, conferences and forums around the world determined the causes of climate change and proposed solutions to correct its anthropogenic component.

The recommendations of the various scientific meetings bringing together academics, researchers, governments, practitioners, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) have shown the transversal nature of the problem to fight against the harmful effects of climate change and ensure fair access of all the common property of mankind. In this world of communicating climatic change vases, we are entitled from now on to assert that “humanity rhymes with vulnerability”.

This social ethics debate can be constructive only with the prospect of the evaluation and the distribution of the social damage, the costs of the inferred multisectorial effects, the evaluation of the investments of solidarity to be implemented to decrease externalities in the context of major projects for the achievement of the 2030 SDGs.

The case study of Pygmies and Mbororos peoples illustrates the vulnerability literally. It raises the challenges of the adaptation and highlights the importance of the social dimension as lever of the social inclusion. The Pygmies, who depend on the nature and manage it since millenniums, play an important role in the ecosystem protection.

The first part will present the forms of vulnerabilities experienced by these populations. In the second place, on the basis of the acceptance of the diversity as richness, it will be question, to show the commitments of social inclusion taken by these developing countries at the national and regional levels as well as the strategies of social accompaniment which protect these populations victims of social upheaval (national parks, nature reserves, protected or complex areas of areas protected from the natural world heritage) and from the poverty.

Finally, we will present the social dimension of development projects in the defence and the respect of the fundamental rights of these populations to face the adverse effects of climate change.