The global strategy to tackle climate change insists that saving greenhouse gas emissions anywhere in the world is worthwhile. So at the moment politicians set great store by the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism, which helps industrialized nations reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by financing projects to reduce emissions in developing countries which themselves produce very little of them.

Africa’s CDM share is less than 4% of the 1,000 projects under way worldwide. These can cost up to US $200,000 to develop, just the amount of money initially given to each African state to develop its national plan for adapting to climate change.

Without private sector financing or donor support to go beyond this national plan, it is unlikely that Africa will obtain more CDM projects and the credits for reducing emissions which they bring.

In future, though, whatever happens to the CDM, the salvation of forests through REDD will be a form of nature conservation that can be rewarded with financial support. Africa will benefit from this by being paid not to reduce forests, not to pollute, and by implementing sustainable agroforestry.

The details of this arrangement should be finalized between the UN Climate Change Convention’s Copenhagen conference  and its Johannesburg conference in 2011. The text agreed in Copenhagen should help to define REDD (when it goes further with a clearly defined Payment for Ecosystem Services, it is called REDD+).

At the World Agroforesty Congress in Nairobi last August, Dr Dennis Garrity, director general of the World Agroforestry Centre, said: “Almost one half of all farmed landscapes in the world have significant-to-dense tree cover”.

Ecosystems such as the Upper Guinea Rainforest and Congo Basin lock down 200+ tonnes of carbon per hectare. If sustainably managed, such forests can be worth more intact as carbon reservoirs than as timber export reserves.

Forests and trees on farms will have to be accurately mapped and their carbon storage potential quantified if REDD is to work. Industries will then be encouraged to pay for the preservation of trees by knowing exactly how much carbon dioxide is being stored in them.

Africa’s equatorial forest belt will benefit from REDD by having more forests declared no-logging reserves, and by smallholder farmers being encouraged to invest more in agroforestry. Under REDD , there is more likelihood of them thinking it worthwhile to improve their land by planting trees instead of removing them.

Having more trees on farmland is a reason for including agroforestry in the REDD section of the Copenhagen negotiations. This does not mean though that the forests should be replaced with palm trees or other plantations. For that, the World Agroforestry Centre says, existing farm land and degraded land can be used.

Dr Peter Minang, of the International Center for Research in Agroforestry, told the Nairobi Congress that REDD will be more realistic if it includes the stewardship of African farmers.

And REDD+ represents a foot through the door “to even more creative carbon payments for improved land management on farms”, agrees the UN Environment Programme  executive director Dr Achim Steiner.

For the industrialised nations which are the main producers of greenhouse gases, climate change means reducing emissions so as to mitigate their effects. There is plenty of funding and the technology to help to achieve this.

Adapting to the inevitable effects of change is the other prong of the industrial world’s response. But for least developed countries (LDCs) with negligible greenhouse gas emissions, tackling climate change can be achieved only through adaptation. And that poses a dilemma for vulnerable countries like Sierra Leone.

The country lies on the tropic of Capricorn on the West African coast. The past decade has produced noticeable changes in its weather patterns. Rising sea levels were recorded as long ago as 2000. In 2005 there was a severe Harmattan wind from the Sahara, followed by the country’s worst recorded drought. Coastal areas have regularly been flooded.

Livestock washed out to sea
The low-lying settlement of Kroo Bay in Freetown is being more severely flooded with each passing year. If the rains come at night, this population of poor traders, craftspeople and retailers are flooded out of their tin shacks. Pigs and other livestock they tend are swept out to sea, property is damaged beyond repair and half a foot of mud is left in the wake of the flood waters. Each year residents try to build their homes on slightly higher ground or encroach illegally within the city.

The high tide in this estuary is 150 cm higher than it was in 1996, according to meteorological officers. This is exacerbated during the rainy seasons when the upland streams flow into the estuary. There are 32 similar slum settlements along the coastline of Freetown, home to around 150,000 of the capital’s one million residents. Wealthier people are not immune either. It is already too late for the millionaire’s mansions at Lakka on one of Sierra Leone’s most valuable tourist beaches at. They are being washed away.

Short of adaptation funds
The majority of the least developed countries have now drawn up a National Adaptation Plan of Action (NAPA). These plans are a key strategy of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and offer an opportunity for each country to receive US$350,000 in funds to embark on their most urgent adaptation priorities. It is not much, but it is a significant help when there are no resources in the national budget for adaptation activities.  

But Sierra Leone, though fulfilling its obligations to the UNFCCC, remains, like most other least developed countries, short of funding. The UNFCCC member states met in the Polish city of Poznan in December 2008 to develop plans for combating climate change. For one Sierra Leonean delegate, Dennis Lansana, the country’s director of meteorological services, the negotiations fell short. “The conference was largely inconclusive,” he told me afterwards.  

Dennis Lansana insists the UNFCCC had promised to support Sierra Leone to produce greenhouse gas inventories, assist in communications with the UN Secretariat, and provide pilot funding for adaptation: “Very little of this promise has materialised in Sierra Leone in recent years” he says.    At the Sierra Leone Climate Change Office, I was told that the country’s proposed adaptation projects were realistic, if only the funds could work through the UN bureaucracy. Will it be too late?

One preoccupation for a country like Sierra Leone is growing enough food. Its National Adaptation Plan of Action reflects this, and it will receive international help for its dry-area irrigation schemes, but not until 2011, when administrator of the UN adaptation funds, the Global Environment Facility, can factor it in. Everyone hopes mass starvation will not occur before then.  

Arguments abound within the UN system as to whether the NAPAs are worth funding, even where the funds are available. Europe luckily is championing support for funding, particularly for its African, Caribbean and Pacific partners.  

Louis Riera, the European Commission’s development head, supports the EU initiative for a Global Climate Change Alliance (GCCA) to develop vulnerable countries’ adaptation and risk management. At the COP14 in Poznan in December, he told me that adaptation should not be postponed but the plans must be better defined. “The NAPAs are wish lists, vague, with a lack of strategic framework,” he said.
 
But Sierra Leone’s climate experts think their NAPA is realistic and strongly deserves funding. Priorities include a coastal area management review, the strengthening of meteorological data collection, and water resource management measures like irrigation and rainwater collection. A wish list? Hardly.  

Low priority country
Even so, Sierra Leone’s adaptation projects are low on the EU’s priority list. Vanuatu, the Maldives, Cambodia and Tanzania will be the pilot recipients from the Global Climate Change Alliance’s 2009 funding round, and 11 other least developed countries are on its 2010 list. So perhaps Sierra Leone could learn a lesson in pro-active jostling from other vulnerable countries.  

The country also lacks the political will to finance climate change adaptation. This is why an NGO, the Environmental Forum for Action (ENFORAC), in 2007 held the country’s first national symposium on climate change. 

The Union of Environmental Journalists and Green Scenery, both forum members, are running a conservation project with a media component. They are telling coastal and forest communities about sustainable energy, the dangers of deforestation, and the importance of forests in moderating climate change. In the words of a Jamaican meteorologist, Clifford Malu, ‘effective adaptation must involve grassroots community participation’.  

The growing awareness that climate change threatens poverty reduction and other Millennium Development Goals makes it all the more vital for the poor and vulnerable to know about the dangers ahead. A vulnerable country like Sierra Leone cannot afford not to adapt. But who is listening to its call for help?

In a report made available to the Climate Change Media Partnership, the Washington-based Global Environment Facility confirms the climatic hazards faced by Sierra Leone.

Climate-induced adverse changes in Sierra Leone include protracted dry seasons, heat waves, strong winds, thunderstorms, landslides, unpredictable rainfall patterns, and floods. According to the Union of Environmental Journalists, each of Sierra Leone’s 12 districts has experienced extreme doses of some form or other of these hazards over the past decade.

The Climate Change Office in Sierra Leone told CCMP that its National Adaptation Programme of Actions (NAPA) recognises that poor communities are suffering the most due to floods and water shortages, which affect food production. In Sierra Leone, the crops affected include rice, corn, millet and cocoa.

Sierra Leone’s NAPA for climate change advises that adequate irrigation systems should be installed in the uplands, and viable drainage and water control must be implemented in the lowlands. Farmer Based Organisations should also be trained in sustainable water management, according to Sierra Leone’s climate experts.

In a reaction to the GEF report, the Union of Environmental Journalists stated that food security will depend on the observation of climatic conditions between now and the expected implementation of NAPA irrigation programmes in 2011.

The former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Professor Martin Parry, says that since it issued its 2007 report the Arctic has begun melting faster. The seas have become less able to absorb carbon dioxide. Coral reefs are also diminishing in both their quantity and carbon absorption capability, because of the increasing acidification of the oceans.

All of this is happening now, and after the international climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, comes to an end in 2012 is too far away to do another assessment of the situation. The assessment must be annual. But the drudgery of consensus-building needed to get a better deal from the protocol means that the longer the climate change issue is put on hold, the more difficult it will become to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs).

With the current increase in GHG emissions, the longer we wait, the longer it will take to clean up the mess. In Earth terms, this translates into centuries – two at least, perhaps three.

Now with America and other major GHG-producing countries feeling the pinch of a global economic crisis, there is a widespread fear that money for the GHG clean-up will not be as forthcoming.

Alan Miller of the World Bank’s International Finance Corporation says private sector participation in the clean-up process may not amount to all it should, because of the global economic pinch. Finance institutions in particular, he says, are like turtles, “who withdraw when they don’t know what is happening.”

But Mr. Miller is partially assured at least that the adaptation and climate investment funds are safe from the economic squeeze; within the past six months both the World Bank and the IFC have improved their commitments to the developing world and to climate change adaptation projects. But the polluting private sector industries, he says, must be prepared to do more.

Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, who chairs the UN Indigenous Peoples’ Forum, says the industrialized world can do more, based on the fact that the USA and EU rapidly allocated US $4 trillion worth of financial bailouts to cope with the economic crisis. This, she says, is 45 times more than their development assistance and 313 times more than their contribution to climate change finance. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the organiser of the Poznan conference, needs more of this money.

The money is apparently there, somewhere. Oil profits, perhaps, could have saved the day.

At a global oil consumption rate of 83 million barrels a day, just a $10 tax could generate the hundreds of millions needed for climate change mitigation.

But the problem goes beyond taxation and involves a change of attitude. The entire planet consumes oil, yet 3/5ths of its majority poor have little representation in how the profits are used. The irony of this becomes starkly obvious when the planet becomes afflicted by climate change effects such as the 2008 drought in Australia, whose 70% contribution to the world’s wheat market created food-price increases felt by the poorest of the poor. This is damage for which there is no fund yet available.

While some governments are investing in green technologies, some are hoarding and refusing to acknowledge their contribution to greenhouse gas emissions and their moral obligations to mitigate them. Prioritizing actions makes all the difference between, say, building islands in the northern Atlantic to harness wind power, and building islands in the Persian Gulf to erect spectacular holiday resorts.

Such indiscretions will manifest themselves sooner rather than later. And who will pay? Experts say it will be the elderly, the young and the poor.