Africa: a continent of resilience and opportunity

Africa is often referred to as a continent of opportunity, economic or otherwise. In part because of the progress made – since 2000, rates of extreme poverty and hunger have dropped as have the number of new HIV infections, and access to education and health care is increasing. But also due to the predicted changes to take place over the next few decades – 6 of the 10 fastest-growing economies are in Africa, and a growing youth population means that the continent will have a working-age population bigger than that of China or India by 2035.

Indeed the theme of the first ever US-Africa Leaders Summit which recently drew to a close, was “Investing in the Next Generation.”. 40 or so heads of states and government from across Africa joined President Obama in Washington to discuss the opportunities for developing sustainable African economies. A key message from the summit is that to achieve future growth, economies must tackle the drivers and impacts of climate change, and John Kerry remarked at a Working Session on Resilience and Food Security in a Changing Climate that in order to “ensure that farmers, fishermen, and the billions who depend on the food that they produce are able to endure the climate impacts that are already being felt, let alone yet to come” is to focus our efforts “on the intersection of climate and food security, by adopting creative solutions that increase food production and build resilience to climate change”.

Some political progress on supporting climate change adaptation is happening. The African Union agreed in the 2014 Malabo Declaration to increase agricultural growth to cut poverty and hunger in half by 2025, to double agricultural productivity, halve post-harvest losses and reduce stunting to 10% across the continent as well as to reduce vulnerability to climate and weather risk, and mainstream resilience.

The Global Alliance for Climate Smart Agriculture, planned to launch at the UN Secretary General’s Climate Summit on September 23, is an international alliance, aiming to drive momentum and interest on climate smart agriculture (CSA) and to become a platform to coordinate the adoption of CSA. The USAID and the Rockefeller Foundation have also recently announced a $100 million Global Resilience Partnership to “accelerate promising technologies and ideas and identify new opportunities that can better build the resilience of families, communities, countries and regions”, for example, improving drought cycle management and expanding climate-resilient agricultural practices.

Also recently launched in Nairobi, a UNEP report, Keeping Track of Adaptation Actions in Africa, presents practical examples of successful low-cost adaptation solutions from around sub-Saharan Africa. The report details several examples of adaptation projects that have helped people cope with the impacts of climate change and have also stimulated local economies and incentivised government investment and policy change. The report is in part responding to the 2013 Africa Adaptation Gap Report which recognised the potentially staggering costs of climate change for Africa.

Africa’s Adaptation Gap

A recent technical report published by the UN Environment Programme, the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) and Climate Analytics investigates the impacts of climate change and the costs of adaptation in Africa. Africa’s Adaptation Gap report  is a warning to policymakers of both the implications for Africa should global mitigation activities fall short as well as the urgent need for scaling up adaptation activities and funding in this continent, a region the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report named a “vulnerability hot spot” for the impacts of climate change.

Africa is projected to experience severe climatic changes compared to historical conditions: more frequent extreme weather events; sea level rise of over one metre with global average temperature increases of 4°C by 2100; significant decreases in precipitation across many areas; a loss of biodiversity and potentially grazing area; and maize, millet and sorghum growing areas are likely to become unviable with global average temperature increases of 3°C as growing seasons shorten and optimal heat ranges are exceeded..

The report summarises the estimated costs of adaptation Africa faces under different scenarios:

• With current emissions levels, adaptation costs will be $7 to $15 billion per year to 2020.
• If we close the emissions gap to hold average global temperature increases to below 2°C, costs will be $35 billion per year by 2050 and $200 billion by 2070, although a large degree of uncertainty exists.
• If we continue on our current emissions trajectory, and global average temperatures rise by 3.5-4°C by 2100, adaptation costs could be $50 billion per year by 2050 and $350 billion by 2070.

These adaptation costs will include such things as early warning systems, coastal protection, drought-resistant crops, irrigation, desalinisation and infrastructure protection, and, as the report shows, will be significant even with immediate emissions reductions. The report illustrates the critical link between developed country mitigation activities and the financial burden of adaptation in Africa, a burden that could constrain economic development.

Agroecosystems: the future of sustainable farming

A new book launched last month at World Water Week in Stockholm sets out the challenges the world faces in feeding a growing population in the face of severe resource constraints and climate change. Authors of the book, the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems in partnership with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), emphasise the importance of adopting a new way of farming, viewing farms as interfaces between achieving global food security and environmental protection or in other words as agroecosystems.

With a focus on water, the book details the importance of ecosystem services for the direct provision of food and as the ecological foundation upon which agriculture rests. In a recent UK government report ecosystem services were estimated to benefit the UK economy by as much as £1.6 billion per year with pollinators contributing some 13% of the country’s annual income from farming. Not only are these services under threat from farming systems that degrade the resource base but from such global hazards as climate and demographic change.

The book, Managing Water and Agroecosystems for Food Security, not only details the challenges we face in providing enough food to feed the population and the importance of water for agriculture and a range of other ecosystem services, it also provides practical approaches to managing water for agroecosystems. For example, increasing water productivity across a range of food producing industries as well as market mechanisms such as Payments for Ecosystems Services. As the authors acknowledge, however, an agroecosystems approach will require societal and political change at the local, landscape and global levels.

World Environment Day 2013

Today, the second day of the European Green Week conference in Brussels, is World Environment Day.  The theme of the conference is Cleaner Air for All, while World Environment Day is centred around supporting the anti-food waste and food loss campaign, Think.Eat.Save.

Every year 1.3 billion tonnes of food is wasted, equivalent to the same amount produced in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, 1 in every 7 people in the world go to bed hungry and more than 20,000 children under the age of 5 die daily from hunger. Today we are being urged to become more aware of the environmental impact of our food choices and of the enormous imbalance in lifestyles in the world. For the average UK family, as written by Philip Clarke, the Chief Executive of Tesco, food waste costs Tesco customers around £680 ($1,045) a year.

To get involved in Green Week, the largest conference on the environment in Europe, you can follow the debates online and via social media. All the details are here: www.greenweek2013.eu. To see how others are supporting World Environment Day and how you can get involved visit: http://www.unep.org/wed/activities/

To become a more informed consumer you can visit Generation Awake, an EU campaign on resource efficiency. In their words, “making smart day-to-day decisions that consider the environment will help you save money and improve your lifestyle as well as make your city, your country, Europe and the planet healthier and more sustainable.”

 

Progress from Doha on tackling climate change

A series of articles by Smita Nakhooda for the Overseas Development Initiative, Amy Goodman for The Guardian, and Aljazeera News lay out the progress made at the 18^th Conference of the Parties to the UNFCCC held from in Doha from the 26^th November to the 8^th December 2012. As Amy Goodman points out, “latest findings suggest that the goal of limiting global temperature rise to 2ºC may now be beyond reach, and that we may now be locked into a 4-6ºC temperature increase”. So what are global leaders doing to avoid ‘dangerous climate change’?

1)    The Kyoto Protocol will run for a second commitment period from 1^st January 2013 to 31^st December 2020. But only the EU and Australia are bound by commitments to reduce emissions, and emissions reductions, an average of 18% relative to 1990 levels by 2020, are ‘not particularly challenging’. Further to this, countries such as the US and Canada are unlikely to adopt these commitments anytime soon.