adminAfrica Environment Day or the Wangari Maathai Day commemorations for this year were moved to the resort town.
For two days last week, angry brooms harrowed through the streets of Victoria Falls seeking to restore decency. Many trees were planted. All this, as part of a national campaign to eliminate litter, limit land pollution and promote good environmental management practices.
Building clean, climate smart cities for a sustainable future, that’s the objective. However, it will take much more than a day’s (or two) street clean-up work to build these model cities and towns, which are climate smart and resilient.
Several sectors such as transport, sewer and waste management will require rigorous reform to improve efficiency and reduce carbon emissions. But if implemented effectively with clearly defined pre- and post-scenario mechanisms, one-day street clean-ups may be a sound footing to achieving long-term, sustainable litter and pollution control in Zimbabwe.
The most important factor for this strategy to work are people: communities need to buy into the projects, they need to own them, they need to take responsibility. They need to take responsibility of disposing of refuse in its rightful place – the bin, and of cleaning up when it is recklessly misplaced, both in the home and on the street.
Now, as Zimbabwe remembered the important works of leading Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai, after whom the day has been renamed, this sense of community ownership was evident in the Victoria Falls.
Mr Steady Kangata, spokesperson for the Environmental Management Agency, said the two-day street clean-up in the holiday town showed a new positive trend in which local communities, businesses, the church and Government are working together to kick garbage out from the streets.
He said although waste collection and disposal remained a major challenge in places like Harare, it was encouraging to realise communities were now taking charge. Groups such as the Catholic and Methodist churches had even set aside special days to promote environmental protection through street clean-ups.
Cities like Mutare and Bulawayo have improved quite significantly in the management of waste.
Mr Kangata said: “We have understood that involving the individual and communities in projects like these will produce the best possible results.
The bottom-up approach, in which communities buy into and initiate clean-up campaigns, as opposed to the top-down approach, will be very crucial for the future of sustainable management of waste in Zimbabwe.
“This is also why, as we commemorated the AED this year, we have deliberately moved away from ceremonial speechified events to real action, for two days.”
The AED is celebrated every March 3 across Africa. Some of the biggest environmental concerns facing Zimbabwe today include deforestation, soil erosion, land degradation air, land and water pollution.
Counting the costs
The social and health impacts of environmental pollution and poor waste management are vast and frightening. By the end of December 2012, Zimbabwe had recorded 5 829 cases of typhoid from a year earlier, according to a weekly bulletin from the Ministry of Health, which reports on numerous issues including environmental-health diseases. Nearly half a million people complained of diarrhoea and 290 eventually died. At least 45 percent of those were children under five years of age.
More than 44 000 cases of dysentery were reported last year, of whom 20 percent were children below five years. Over 200 people died of malaria from more than 300 000 cases recorded. Four years ago, 4 000 people died during an outbreak of cholera and 100 000 were infected.
All these diseases are communicated by vectors such as flies, rats, dogs and humans. The non-human vectors thrive in uncollected waste.
Some health analysts believe these numbers may be understated “as many Zimbabweans have no access to health care due to high costs, distance from clinics and religious beliefs”.
Other cases go unreported for numerous reasons. The costs of building climate smart cities may be high but worth the trouble.
It cannot compare with the value of human life. This is important. The UN Panel on Climate Change predicts that by 2080 diseases like malaria will be widespread in tropical countries such as Zimbabwe owing to climate change. Cities and towns, which by then will be overburdened by a critical shortage of water, according to other UN estimates, will not be spared the malaria attack. This could spell a multiple offensive from disease on urban dwellers.
Guilty as charged
The Zimbabwe National Recycling Programme, which has provided alternatives for waste management to some local authorities, said it was criminal for people to die of waste-related sicknesses.
“Councils are mandated and do collect service fees to provide habitable living spaces. So having been advised of the solution adopted globally to waste management (i.e. recycle), failure to act by councils could be viewed as criminal negligence . . . ,” it said.
In 1918 Archibold Johnston, Mayor of Bethlehem in Pennysylvannia, USA, was quoted by the ZNRP as saying of council inefficiencies: “The municipal problem is primarily and essentially one of human welfare. Every municipal is morally bound to furnish its inhabitants with an abundant supply of pure water, the purest air possible and well drained soils – sewerage, street cleaning, garbage and refuse collection and disposal. Any other than these sanitary standards in a city will be considered as criminal negligence and suffer or cause for just punishment, since public health is a public duty.”
God is faithful.
Online Reporter