adminClimate change summits and conferences are being held with increasing frequency, a recent one in Durban, South Africa, in December last year.
But the truth is simple, we are nowhere near where we need to be to avert catastrophic climate change and the chance of warding it off is slipping out of our hands with every passing year that nations fail to agree on a rescue plan for the planet.
It is clear that tackling the problem of rising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere will be an enormous undertaking considering that developed countries continue to drag their feet and apply delaying tactics in implementing climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies.
This is despite the fact that bigger nations have registered significant industrial development while emitting gases when in fact developing countries have not even started developing. This has significantly slowed down development in poor nations.
Take for instance the energy sector. For developing countries, expanding and modernising their energy sector is particularly important since limited availability of energy constrains human and economic development.
Energy services underpin almost all aspects of human activity. The lack of modern energy services can prevent the realisation of basic human needs like education, sanitation, health, and communication, while insufficient and unreliable power can also constrain industrial production.
The energy sector requires a huge capital outlay and that means for developing countries such as Zimbabwe, to construct or expand power stations to meet its national demand, it will have to engage multilateral agencies for funding.
But developed countries often throw spanners when small countries seek funding for projects on the pretext that they will emit gases.
They always say for nations to get funding for such projects, they have to first meet gas emission requirement targets. This is despite scientific studies indicating that Africa as a whole emits a mere 3,7 percent of the global output compared to the United States’ 20 percent and China’s 21,5 percent.
This, therefore, sends a clear message that bigger nations do not want smaller nations to make rapid developments but would rather bully them into submission through aid programmes and trade.
While on the other hand there are competing and widely divergent views on the extent to which adaptation can succeed in preventing potentially adverse effects of climate change on food security, studies suggest that developing countries in the tropics, primarily Middle East and Africa, could face difficulties in adapting as most of those countries are classified as water-stressed.
Research shows that the world is sleepwalking towards a four Degrees Celsius temperature increase, where millions of people will be displaced by floods and drought.
That means there may be increased risks of hunger in some locations in the tropics and subtropics where many of the world’s poorest people live.
This leaves poor nations like Zimbabwe — whose economy is driven by agriculture — with a mammoth task in helping its poor people manage risks better such as from harvest failure.
Zimbabwe’s population, like in many other developing countries, depends largely on agriculture for their livelihood and about 80 percent of the rural population lives in natural agro-ecological regions three, four and five where rainfall is erratic and unreliable.
The success rate of rain-fed agriculture in these regions is pathetic as it is said to be in the order of one good harvest in every four to five years making dry land cultivation a risky venture.
A Government report recently revealed that crops planted on about a third of the land that was put under agriculture in Zimbabwe last year were a write-off as crops wilted due to moisture stress caused by drought.
Only a few years ago, the Meteorological Services Department could reasonably predict the onset of the rainy season and the amount of rain that was expected to fall fairly accurately. However, over the last three years or so, their predictions have been going awry, with dire consequences.
Bulawayo’s five supply dams reportedly received insignificant inflows of two percent of their combined capacity in a season whose rainfall was predicted to be average to above average. This has left the city in a fix and in need of emergency solutions to avert a water crisis within the next three months.
Climate change-related catastrophes being experienced already in most countries provide terrible examples of what the future might look like for most developing countries if the world fails to curtail its carbon emissions. Studies indicate that by the year 2030, climate change may expose 90 million more people to malaria in
Africa alone. Similarly, meningitis outbreaks in Africa are strongly correlated with drought and the disease is likely to increase.
Diarrhoea is forecast to rise five percent by 2020 in poor countries because of climate change while about 60 percent of the world’s population, especially from poor countries, will be exposed to the disease.
Vulnerable people are dying every day because of climate-related impacts and more than 500 million people from developing countries are appealing for tangible measures to curb climate change but their pleas seem to bring no change as their voices do not carry much political weight simply because they are from poor countries.
Climate change is a multi-dimensional global problem that requires truly multi-dimensional global solutions. But where can we go while we pull the wagon in several different directions?
Developed countries must be human enough and face the tune of the music they composed by providing funds for climate change adaptation strategies instead of using climate change issues to control poor nations.
Anyway, why should Africa and other developing countries be left to suffer for the problems created by others?
Online Reporter