Urban climate: Crisis of our era

among others) are beginning to sink due to rising sea levels triggered by heavy rains and melting of glacier in the Himalayas and arctic poles, under the influence of global warming-a key indicator of climate change.

When some nations in Africa are experiencing severe rain stress, others like Namibia and of late Nigeria are in severe flood risk. What this reflects is that even in sub-Saharan Africa climate is fast changing, raising more fears in both coastal and inland nations.
While the change is global, impacts are local and are a dilemma to many nations both developed and developing, with major dilemmas being for developing nations such as Zimbabwe. Often, the problem facing developing nations in formulating response strategies to the threat of climatic change is lack of background information on the most probable direction and magnitude of climatic changes.

According to Ingram and Hong, the indicators of climate change have long been recognised around the world: sea-level rise, powerful storms, flooding, rise and falls in temperature and drought.
Although scientists have not conclusively linked individual weather events to global warming, policy intervention has been advisable, so as to reduce the growing risks of significant economic and social damages linked to climate change.

Apart from physical risks climate change affects urban health and has an economic loss associated with it, which is yet to be quantified. Climate change is defined as a shift of climatic conditions in a directional incremental mode, with values of climatic elements changing significantly.
The looming possibility of global climate change associated with the greenhouse effect, ozone depletion and land surface changes makes it critical that contemporary society anticipate and plan for increased and chronic future climate impacts.

While the bulk of past and current greenhouse gas emissions have come from highly industrial nations, serious effects of global climate change will occur in developing countries, mainly because of poverty and the existence of an already heavily degraded environment argues Bolin et al. 1986, Houghton et al. 1992.
Ingram and Hong conducted a study in this direction and their findings have shown that the current global change in climate is a result of human induced factors. Carbon dioxide (46 percent), electricity and heating (24,6 percent), deforestation (18,2 percent), industry (11,8 percent) and transport (9,5 percent) have emerged to be the major contributors of green house gases, which cause climate change.

Although it is difficult at this stage to attribute the observed climatic trends to any single factor, it is important to quantify these effects if predictions of the impact of climate change are to be assessed. There has also been growing evidence of climate change in Zimbabwe, which has long been observed.

According to a study done by Unganai, climate change is fast hitting sub-Saharan Africa. Current regional climate patterns for Zimbabwe records suggest air temperature warming of up to 0,8°C and a decline in annual precipitation during the past 60 years. Over the past decades since 1933 to 1993 daytime temperatures over Zimbabwe have risen by up to 0,80C, which translates to a 0,10 percent rise per decade. Precipitation has declined by up to 10 percent on average over the period 1900 to 1993, which is about 1 percent per decade.

This shows a warming trend and therefore reasonable to assume that a 1°C rise within the next 100 years will be surpassed depending on the future greenhouse gas emissions and resulting shifts in atmospheric chemistry and physics. In 1996 Unganai concluded that in Zimbabwe warming has been greatest over urban settlements, where both night time and day time temperatures show an increase, consistent with the heat island effect.

This is sufficient basis, for the need to localise the climate debate in urban areas in the country. Urban areas have emerged to be battle grounds for climate change.
The UN habitat in its 2009 report entitled “Planning sustainable cities” concluded that urban areas in both developed and developing countries will increasingly feel the effects of phenomena such as climate change, resource depletion, food insecurity and economic instability.

While other challenges are noted climate change has been confirmed. The United Nations in its February 2011 report also cautioned urban areas to plan for climate change as a territorial challenge in their own backyards. The discourse on climate change is thus becoming urban, and as such Zimbabwe’s urban areas has to respond accordingly. Hence, in these series I will unpack a framework for Zimbabwe through the governance lenses.

In my previous series dated August 26, 2011 (“The business sector should go green”), August 30 (“Realising man’s innate connection to nature”) and September 2, 2011 (“Urban climate governance”), I isolated the focus from environmental issues in general to urban environments, setting the agenda for urban climate governance, a move which many of my close critics deplored.
The intention was to provoke further research in the urban climate domain.