Chronicle Editor
Stephen Mpofu
OUR global village is under serious siege by deliberate and ignorant saboteurs of the climate, sending human, animals and God’s other living creations into a state of immolation.
It is therefore proper for this pen to say thumbs up to our government for Zimbabwe working with other African countries in the inaugural Climate and Health Africa Conference (CHAC 2024) held in Harare earlier this week in advance of the 29th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29) to be held in Baku, Azerbaijan next month.
God created day and night for people to perform tasks that better their lives by day and for non-humans to fend for themselves while both rest from their various undertakings by night.
In His wisdom, the Creator put a lid over the sun to ensure that its more powerful, and therefore harmful rays did not affect Earth to harm human and non-human creations.
But lo and behold people kicked God in the teeth, as one might say, and continue doing so by rendering the ozone, the perforated layer through which God wanted just the right heat to reach Earth for people to live and perform their existence tasks without let or hindrance.
But what do we see belligerent human creatures doing?
One powerful Western country thumbs its nose, as it were, at the Paris Climate Change Agreement and the walk off led to factory chimneys in that country pumping billows of carbon into the atmosphere from unrestricted factory chimneys into the air.
Not wanting to be outdone developmentally, some other developed states also loosened their control on carbon emissions and those dangerous loads of carbons were beefed up by smokes from veld fires as well as from unmodified factory chimneys and coal plants in developing countries, Africa and Zimbabwe included.
Trees play a crucial environmental protection role by absorbing and sinking carbon gases. But rampant deforestation in some cases for firewood for sale to urban dwellers renders that role null and void and so detrimental to the human race.
The combined load of carbon hit ozone like a time bomb, rendering it wafer thin with the result that dangerous rays of the sun hit Earth, their heat causing perennial droughts in Africa, Zimbabwe included, causing hunger, starvation and diseases as well as cyclones such as Idai experienced in Eastern Zimbabwe not so long ago, with flooding and destruction of homes and other essential facilities for human existence.
Today, a large number of cattle have reportedly died in Matabeleland South province for lack of feed and water as a result of the drought, with the January disease unheard of in previous good times having closed cattle pens in Masvingo province and elsewhere, with livestock wiped off.
The animal losses mentioned above were unknown in good times in the past before human saboteurs made the climate rear its ugly head.
Today, uneducated elders out there in the country may be forgiven for believing and declaring that “God is laughing at us through climate and weather changes”.
In the present circumstances, authored by the demise of human and animal lives due to climate change, African and all other nations of the world must unite under the United Nations to work for the revival of a conducive climate existence that God the Creator of all things intended.
Online Reporter