Wangari warns Africa on climate stance

By: Fidelis Zvomuya on November 3rd, 2009

Africa must have a strong and clear voice as it heads for Copenhagen in December, the Nobel Prize laureate and environmentalist Wangari Maathai has said.

Mathaai says Africa needs a clear and detailed strategy for combating the impact of this global environmental challenge, adaptation as well as mitigation.

National adaptation plans and agreements which emerge from the UN climate meeting in Copenhagen must help to achieve sustainable development and alleviate poverty, as well as concentrating on the most vulnerable groups, such as women and children, said Professor Maathai.

In an interview during the second World Congress of Agroforestry in Nairobi, she said Africa must agree on a common position beforehand. “It will be unfortunate if we go to this meeting as individual countries. We need a strong and clear voice that will be heard by all,” she said.

Professor Maathai said Africa must make sure that its stance will keep the forests standing, so that they can continue to provide essential environmental services such as carbon sinks, reservoirs of biodiversity, water catchments and the regulation of climate and rainfall patterns.

Many Africans, especially the rural and urban poor, will be affected badly by climate change. As they feel these negative impacts they will compete for political power to control their diminishing resources, especially agricultural and grazing land, water and food, she said. This will lead to conflict, violence, displacement, migrations and even death.

“Our leaders should seriously focus on climate change and embrace mitigation strategies like protecting indigenous forests, halting charcoal burning, and controlling grazing and human settlements in forests. While there are no quick fixes, governments must shield citizens from the unavoidable negative impacts. One of the strategies is to protect, conserve and restore the forests.”

While Maathai blames human settlements in forests as a major contributor to environmental problems, the findings of a new study released at the Congress suggest that farming and forestry are not mutually exclusive. It also says that although more trees are declining in forests, farmland is seeing a sharp rise in tree cover.

Professor Maathai said this should be achieved through the use of indigenous trees, not exotic species that introduced other environmental problems.

She urged Africa’s  Copenhagen partnership to negotiate for mechanisms that allowed Africans to afford low-carbon energy sources such as solar, wind, biofuels, biomass, hydro and geothermal power.

Recently 10 African leaders who met in Ethiopia resolved to ask rich countries to pay US$67 billion annually to African countries to help to mitigate the impact of global warming on the world’s poorest continent, Reuters reported.

The meeting, on 24 August 2009, was meant to find a common stance for Africa ahead of the December conference in Copenhagen. Africa’s ability to negotiate has been limited seriously in the past by the lack of a coherent stance.

“The negotiating team needs to be backed by political weight at the highest level in the continent to ensure that the African voice in climate change negotiations is taken with the seriousness it deserves,” a press statement from the Africa Union said.

Addressing the media before the agroforestry congress, Dr Dennis Garrity, director-general of the World Agroforestry Centre, said he was confident the continent’s leaders and delegations would stand together.

Scientific projections show unequivocally that Africa will be hit harder than other continents by the impacts of climate change. These  will include fundamental effects on agricultural productivity, increases in the prevalence of diseases and poverty, increases in water stress, and trigger for conflict. Africa’s development aspirations are at stake unless urgent steps are taken to address the problem of climate change.