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The 26th Conference of Parties of UN Climate Change, COP26, now in session in Glasgow, Scotland, will be crucial to move forward a lot faster the national and efforts to mitigate, halt and possibly reverse climate change and to create the switch from promises and rhetoric to effective action.
And this action has to be international as well as national. It is not much use, for example, to export carbon emitting industrial processes to the Third World and then blame these regions for global warming.
And in any case developing countries have to be helped to gain the economic growth and development their people deserve and need, without destroying the planet in the process.
Because of the seriousness of COP26, and the crucial work that has to be done at the summit, most countries are sending their Head of Government as the leader of the national teams, making the summit one of the largest gatherings of heads in recent history.
Among those Heads of Government will be President Mnangagwa, and while he is going to Britain to tie down the promises Zimbabwe can make, and the promises from others to Zimbabwe so that development can proceed while carbon emissions decrease, there is the bonus that he is invited and is able to travel to Britain.
Zimbabwe-Britain relations have not been that good over the past two decades, and at times have been very bad, with British sanctions against Zimbabwe still in place.
The change in foreign policy of the Second Republic, of engaging and re-engaging everyone and trying to have at least functional relations with everyone gets a boost at this summit.
Already some of the preliminary matters, such as the formal invitation to the summit along with the assurances that President Mnangagwa was very welcome to lead the Zimbabwean delegation, despite travel bans, were a sign that the possibility exists for improved relations.
This might not be an overnight transformation, but each step in improvement is a welcome step.
The fact that Zimbabwe’s response to Covid-19 was done well, and that the country is one of the African leaders in the vaccination programme, means that there will not be additional quarantine problems.
But for the President, the main work at COP26, as it will be for most of his colleagues, is get much of the vagueness of previous summits converted into detailed plans for action. Zimbabwe will be one of the losers in a warming world.
As with most of Southern Africa we will have a warmer and significantly drier climate, something we have seen already with drought hitting us in around half our rainy seasons.
We now even have new standards, calling the last season wonderful although it started late and ended early, but at least rain fell.
Some of Zimbabwe’s carbon cuts will be automatic, following from those made in other countries.
There now seems to be a general policy emerging that no knew petrol or diesel vehicles will be made after 2030, and it is quite possible that this may be adopted as an international standard.
Obviously this means that the percentage of electric vehicles produced each year will be rising.
Even if carbon-emitting thermal power stations are used to generate the electricity vehicles need, the carbon footprint is dramatically reduced.
Electric motors are far more efficient than internal combustion engines and major power stations produce a lot more energy per tonne of fuel than small generators.
But we do need to develop, and the largest and most convenient source or conventional energy is coal. This is a problem. We need to boost our hydro capacity, with the Batoka scheme, and we need to bring in other renewables, which in Zimbabwe’s case means solar.
That, because solar cells only generate when the sun shines, means we need storage. For a significant block of the initial storage Zimbabwe and Zambia have Lake Kariba.
For much of the time, the two power stations cannot be run at the maximum output, but both can be extended and a system set up that the Kariba stations are just ticking over when the sun shines, storing water, and then going flat out as the sun sets.
There is a reasonable possibility that natural gas will be found at Muzarabani. That will be in time far more important than any oil find, with a refinery coming into operation as petrol and diesel vehicles are being phased out.
A gas power station has a carbon footprint less than half that of an equivalent coal station, and any oil can always be used as a raw material in a chemical industry.
There are also technologies already developed and being developed to push efficiencies, both at the generation stages and at the user stages.
But all this costs money, needs huge investment, and needs practical access to the technologies. So Zimbabwe, as with much of the rest of the developing world, needs access to this investment and these technologies and these sort of requirements need to be written into agreements.
Zimbabwe can also be partly a carbon sink.
We can grow a lot more trees and will need these anyway. Even if they are managed timber forests, they will absorb more carbon than our forests do now so we can partly offset our larger energy generationneeds.
The Grand Inga power station on the Congo River looks every more attractive, but again the levels of investment required will dwarf what can be raised in Southern Africa.
No one pretends that switching to a world with zero net carbon emissions is going to be easy or cheap. That is one reason why there are climate-change deniers and why they tend to hover around the conservative political edges.
But the evidence of climate change is already becoming obvious to everyone in every country, so the deniers move from a mainstream movement to the kinky fringes of political life.
But technically such a world is possible and a great deal of what is required at Cop26 is to hammer home the connections between what science and technology can produce and what people need, and ensure that the financial arrangements to make those connections work are in place.
Online Reporter