adminJeffrey Gogo Climate Story
THE recent drought and flood warnings by the Meteorological Services Department (MSD) will require an intensification of initiatives to address loss and damage as well the entire scope of disaster reduction responsiveness. This is a litmus test for Zimbabwe’s preparedness to handle environmental disaster situations, which have so far been slow and very inadequate, partly due to poor funding.
But the biggest undoing has been lack of clear-cut national policy and strategy to deal with such catastrophes.
The MSD has forecast flash flooding in the vulnerable low-lying areas of Muzarabani, Chisumbanje, Beitbridge, Chibuwe and Tsholotsho, among others, during the current rainy season, putting hundreds of thousands of families at risk of hunger and homelessness.
The mentioned areas are highly risky and have endured multiple disasters in the last 15 years.
The disasters invariably alternate between drought and floods in different seasons, causing widespread hunger, human and animal suffering.
The actual financial costs and losses of natural or climate-linked disasters in Zimbabwe are not known, but huge.
Last week the Civil Protection Unit (CPU) said it was prepared to deal with the aftermaths of any disaster, in this case, of the forewarned floods.
However, it is a public secret the CPU’s handling of a hailstorm that struck only localised areas of rural Mberengwa in the Midlands in 2013 was less than desirable.
In 2014, the Unit is faced with the threat of floods on a large-scale.
In the face of climate change and global warming, Zimbabwe needs to raise the bar on disaster risk management and preparedness.
The trend is to merge these responses with climate change adaptation, as the majority of present-day natural disasters are now directly linked to the science.
Such strategies can help Zimbabwe redefine its development assistance by working harder to use the national wealth to meet priorities of the poor — however little those savings may be.
Strained for funding, the CPU should — during times of calm — transfer some of the work to vulnerable communities themselves by strengthening their ability to combat disasters through serious and rigorous educational and awareness campaigns.
Improving knowledge and information at the grass root level for disaster response and risk reduction can prove effective and efficient in times of hardship.
The Unit may also explore the benefits of promoting multi-stakeholder partnerships by creating synergies with better-funded organisations in the civic sector.
When disaster strikes, the CPU’s role may be reduced to mobilising additional humanitarian aid like food, water, shelter and health care and protecting critical facilities such as schools and hospitals.
At a different scale and through public awareness strategies, the Environmental Management Agency has achieved considerable success, limiting the incidents of veld fires in the last two years.
The figures still remain unsustainably high but have reduced by up to 20 percent.
The Government should invest more into research, investigating the factors affecting change, or lack of, in the management of disaster risk, and in so doing, contribute to both the formulation of the necessary policy framework as well as the development of indicators for effectively measuring the socio-economic impacts of natural disasters.
Disaster risk expert Mr Simon Bere of the Institute of Waste Management Southern Africa in Harare said that disaster response in Zimbabwe was weak due to a lot of factors.
One of them was the absence of policy to directly deal with climate-related disasters.
“Policy is important and unless we have a comprehensive climate change policy and strategy that is directed at national level through the relevant ministries, disaster preparedness will remain compromised,” he said.
Mr Bere was here referring to the National Climate Change Response Strategy, which despite its importance, has taken longer than is necessary to construct.
It’s now two years since the process of crafting the Strategy began but is yet to be completed.
He also spoke of the need for data, information and skills, as important enablers for effective environmental disaster management.
“Data is very important because it allows people to predict the magnitude and behaviour of a disaster before it even happens and allow the country to act to prevent the disaster if it is preventable and to manage its impact if it is unpreventable.
“The current state of Zimbabwe’s environmental information management systems are such that there is lack of continuous local environmental monitoring and local environmental data collection and analysis, making it very difficult to make acceptably accurate predictions and model the environment,” explained Mr Bere.
Both natural and human-induced disasters are increasingly driving through the roof costs in relation to human lives, lost livelihoods and damaged assets and businesses.
Yet such outcomes and the financial and human crisis that accompany catastrophes “can often be traced to policies unsuited to the emerging scales of the problems they confront, and the lack of institutional capacity to implement planning and prevention or to manage disasters.”
When cyclone Eline hit the lowvelds of Zimbabwe in 2000, many families were left homeless and some of the infrastructure destroyed in that storm is still unrepaired to this day.
The 2007 earthquake left most of Manicaland in severe distress.
More than 50 000 people suffered the brunt of Cyclone Japhet in 2003.
Now, in face of repeated disasters in some parts of Manicaland, some non-governmental organisations have started to implement programmes for communal farmers to build climate resilience and improve incomes.
The Zimbabwe Agricultural Income and Economic Development programme (Zim-AIED), a joint venture between communal farmers in Chipinge, USAID and Matanuska, a Malaysian fruit firm, is helping farmers grow bananas to raise incomes.
Farmers involved with the project have so far managed to improve their earnings to at least US1000 per year from an average US350 per year previously while water use efficiency has greatly improved.
These development are important to helping rural farmers cope with the difficult changes in climates that tend to destabilise agriculture the most.
SADC climate experts meeting in Harare last August to predict future climates said: “proper interpretation of seasonal climate forecasts and their application across various socio-economic decision-making processes still remains a challenge in the region.”
The production of accurate weather and climate data plays an integral role in early warning, factors that are crucial to an all round disaster response strategy.
Questions have been raised about the reliability of the MSD’s forecasts, which have also been blamed for misguiding proper responses.
Online Reporter