The Right to Survive looks at the lives of people already being affected by climate-related disasters and how individuals and communities are learning to cope. The images below illustrate what is being done, and how much still needs doing, in order to help protect civilians in developing countries from disasters.
Click on the thumbnails below to view larger version of the images.
Sidadhaya Moidi clearing weed from a millet field following an Oxfam sponsored seed fair in Kassambere village, Borem District, Mali. Rebellion, inter-community conflicts, and years of drought have seriously affected the living conditions of communities in the area.
Photo: Geoff Sayer
"I sell food and other bits and pieces in my grocery shop to make a living. I had the shop for four years and I was making an OK living. I was in Port au Prince when I heard that a hurricane was going to hit the area. I came back to discover that my shop had been totally destroyed; this is all that's left of it."
Photo: Abbie Trayler-Smith / Oxfam - Haiti
Pakistani troops unload relief supplies for earthquake victims from a US helicopter in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan. When an earthquake struck Pakistan and India in 2005, military forces from a number of countries as well as staff from the UN, NATO, and private humanitarian organisations, joined the Pakistan military in providing urgent airlifted aid to assist those in need.
Photo: Edward Parsons/IRIN
"We're doing a lot more things to prepare and cope with floods than we used to." Darius Gare, coordinator of a village emergency response team, with a risk map of their village (Indonesia, 2008).
Photo: Jane Beesley - Indonesia
Chinese President Hu Jintao visits earthquake-ravaged Beichuan in Sichuan province, China (May 2008). Governments have the primary responsibility, both to safeguard life in the face of disasters and to build long-term human security.
Photo: Paula Bronstein / Getty Images - China
A sign hangs from a balcony of a home in Gulfport, Mississippi, USA. The residents lived through the landfall of Hurricane Katrina (August 2005).
Photo: Jim Reed / Getty Images - USA
Rabeya creates a mud bank in front of her house as a protection against flood water in Bogra, Bangladesh. Rabeya has experienced flooding many times, but says that the floods of 2007 were extreme.
Photo: Abir Abdullah/epa/Corbis - Bangladesh
Tropical Cyclone Sidr moves towards the Bangladesh coast, 14 November 2007. The coast of western Bangladesh, the most densely populated low-lying area in the world, has seen some of the worst human disasters of recent decades. Cyclone Sidr claimed the lives of some 3,000 people, yet many hundreds of thousands more were evacuated to safety.
Photo: NASA - Bangladesh
"It is during acute droughts that we enter into conflict with other clans." Chuqulisa, Borena, southern Ethiopia. Since the late 1980s, pastureland and water sources in Borena have been destroyed by drought and desertification. Partly as a result of this, conflict has intensified between the Boran and the Digodi pastoralists (2007).
Photo: Binyam Mengesha/Panos - Ethiopia
A child leans against a flood meter in northeastern Nicaragua. The Miskitos indigenous people of Central America have been living and farming according to natural rhythms for centuries. But now traditional signs found in nature - white cranes, flowering avocado plants, silver fish and flashes of lightning - are no longer heralding the rains.
Photo: David Vinuales/Oxfam GB - Nicaragua
Mirlene Chery, 9, learns songs and role plays about protecting the environment, at the Ecole Evangelie of Haiti in Limbe. As part of its disaster risk reduction, Oxfam works with children and teachers to alert them to the danger of natural disasters and how to keep themselves and their families safe.
Photo: Abbie Trayler-Smith / Oxfam - Haiti
The Civil Protection Committee of Borgne runs through a training exercise to learn how to save lives in a flood. Oxfam works with local committees in the north of Haiti to reduce risks in response to increasing natural disasters.
Photo: Abbie Trayler-Smith - Haiti
