adminJeffrey Gogo Climate Story
THE Institute of Environmental Studies (IES) will host the second national consultative workshop on the creation of the long-awaited National Climate Change Response Strategy (NCCRS) on Wednesday in Harare amid gaping limitations on climate funding and the existing inadequacies on adaptation and mitigation.
Another conference will be held in February where the Strategy is expected to be presented before the National Task-force on climate change for adoption, as the process continues to drag for years while climate impacts heat up.
Professor Sarah Feresu of the IES, the lead consultant in the Strategy making process, said that the second consultative workshop follows a series of marathon workshops held countrywide late last year at provincial and district levels to garner expert and community input.
This week’s workshop will thus attempt to galvanise those contributions into the existing First Draft Strategy published last May, eliminate others and gain new ones, she said.
The IES together with the sponsoring Ministry of Environment, Water and Climate are seeking to wrap up the final document.
Some of the topical issues to emerge from the previous conferences include concerns over unreliable early warning systems, food security, impact of climate change on the water sector, women and children.
“The workshops (in 2013) were interactive because we were trying to gather more information to perfect climate change issues affecting communities at district, provincial and national levels,” said Mr Washington Zhakata, national climate change co-ordinator in the Environment Ministry.
“The issue of early warning was very topical and was being heard from workshop to workshop.
“Communities were concerned that the early warning messages were either not coming at all or not clear all or do not have the language to signal danger.”
Other emerging issues were on land use patterns and how they were affecting river catchments.
“While we looked at climate change there was need to ensure that we have integrated water resources management strategies that look not only at water but land use patterns within the catchments,” he said.
The continuing workshops betray assurances by Prof Feresu during an interview with this writer in September 2013 that the entire Strategy making process including the final document would be completed by early December of the same year.
Last week Prof Feresu said the delays were unforeseen and a result of fatigue among stakeholders.
“We overburdened stakeholders with many workshops. We held 21 workshops inside two months and people were tired,” she said.
Government has also failed to adequately finance the process, depending instead on intermittent funding from development partners such as Comesa, the regional economic bloc for African countries from the east and south.
When a Government struggles to fund a project, designed to help its own citizens, delays are inevitable.
But the successful completion of the NCCRS was expected to mainstream climate change into national budgetary and developmental processes, the current missing link to structured and co-ordinated responses to the dangerous impacts of climate change and global warming.
Most of the responses to the impact of climate on Zimbabwe today remain fragmented, sometimes conflicting, with individual Government ministries responding to different disasters individually where convergence and coordination with other ministries would have been cost effective, producing better, efficient results.
“In Zimbabwe, climate change issues have not yet been main-streamed into sectors that include land use planning, agriculture, natural resource management, industry, energy and transport.
“Thus there is generally a limited supportive environment to respond to climate change issues at national level,” reads the First Draft Strategy.
It suggests that issues to do with adaptation, which are currently virtually hanging loose, be transferred to the Finance and Economic Development Ministry.
Climate change adaptation generally refers “to how people and systems adjust to the actual or expected effects of climate change.
It is often presented as a cyclical process developed in response to climate change impacts or their social, political, and economic consequences.”
Adaptation is complex in nature, inherently unpredictable and is a constantly changing system that cuts across interventions from different sectors.
Adaptation projects usually outlast the prescribed time frame of any normal project, which makes it an important element of any climate response action.
The NCCRS will result in the production of a national plan of action on adaptation and mitigation, one of the most pressing aspects to building resilience among communities.
It will also “provide a framework for a comprehensive and strategic approach on aspects of adaptation, mitigation, technology, financing as well as public education and awareness” and help Government to determine whether there was need for a policy or another legal framework on climate change.
The First Draft Strategy, which is currently going through rigorous checks and balances, highlights the damage climate change has inflicted across many economic sectors including agriculture, water, power and transport among others.
On climate governance, it says that actions must be informed by the principles of decentralisation and autonomy; accountability and transparency; responsiveness and flexibility; and participation and inclusion.
“In terms of inclusion, it is important to include communities in decision making as they are most vulnerable to climate shocks and extreme weather events and in monitoring and evaluation of both climate change and any interventions to mitigate or adapt to climate change,” read the Draft.
Evidence of climate change
Six children drowned while attempting to cross flooded streams in Muzarabani, a low-lying district prone to flooding, last week.
Although this single event cannot be used to sufficiently explain the evidence of climate change, the frequency and intensity of flood events in this area and other low-lying locations in Zimbabwe have escalated to unsustainable levels in the past 15 years.
Most climate experts agree that frequent, extreme floods or droughts such as those that have been ravishing Zimbabwe since the early 1960s are genuine manifestations of climate change and variability.
The country is becoming warmer. Temperatures have risen 0,4 degrees Celsius since 1900, on the average, while precipitation has generally declined 5 percent over the same period.
Rains are becoming erratic and more unpredictable with the main rainy season period between December and February showing trends of sluggishness.
Model experiments suggest that annual rainfall will decrease across Zimbabwe in the future.
This decrease is predicted to occur in all seasons, but is more conclusive for the early and late rains than for the main rainy season months of December to February.
By the 2080s, annual rainfall averages are projected to be between 5 per cent and 18 per cent less than the 1961-1990 average. The decade 1986-1995 in Zimbabwe was about 15 per cent drier than average.
However, there have also been substantial periods – for example, the 1920s, 1950s, 1970s – that have been much wetter than average.
These changes precipitate the need for the speedy conclusion of the NCCRS to help the country respond adequately, effectively and efficiently to the growing risks posed by climate change, which have caused massive socio-economic losses.
God is faithful.
Online Reporter