Nobel laureate urges undivided African voice at climate summit
No commentsBy Aregu Balleh in Nairobi
Nobel Laureate Wangari Maathaai has urged Africans to stand in unison in their effort to fight the impacts of climate change.
In an exclusive interview she gave to this reporter at the 2nd World Agroforestry Congress held here last month, she said the first thing Africans should do to resolve the threat posed by climate change was to realize that the continent is extremely vulnerable to the problem.
“Climate change has been going on for over 200 years, since the industrial revolution, and we cannot reverse it overnight”, she said.
“In Africa we need to recognize that we are extremely vulnerable because we are too poor to buy the technology available to adapt to climate change,” Professor Maathai said.
She said the forthcoming climate change conference in Copenhagen in December is crucial for Africans, and for the rest of the globe.
“Africans need to go to the Copenhagen summit with one voice as a region, insisting that they need to be compensated financially to be able to mitigate climate change,” the Nobel Peace prize winner said.
She also urged African leaders and other stakeholders to prepare citizens so that they could devise ways to adapt to climate change through promoting widespread tree planting.
Professor Maathai commended Ethiopia for intensifying tree planting campaigns over the past few years.
“The government in Ethiopia has been in the forefront in promoting tree planting, and I am proud that it has committed millions of trees towards the Billion Tree Campaign supported by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)”, she said.
Professor Maathai urged African citizens at large to intensify tree planting practices as a means both of improving their livelihoods directly and also of mitigating climate change through the trees’ ability to absorb carbon.
Professor Wangari Maathaai
