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GLOBAL WARMING IN AFRICA: THE HOTTEST ISSUE OF ALL
By Michael McCarthy and Colin Brown
The Independent
June 20, 2005

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/africa/story.jsp?story=648282

Any benefit from more aid to Africa will go up in smoke unless rich nations
halt temperature rises that are robbing rainfall from a continent reliant on
small-scale farming.

...........

Bob Geldof, take note. All the rich nations' efforts to alleviate poverty in
Africa will fail unless climate change can be checked, a coalition of
British aid agencies and environment groups warns today.

More favourable arrangements for African debt relief, aid and trade -- the
point of the rock star's forthcoming Live8 concerts and items on the agenda
for the Gleneagles G8 summit -- will count for nothing unless the effects of
global warming are countered, say the development and green groups in a
hard-hitting new report.

To combat climate change, rich countries must cut their greenhouse gas
emissions further, far beyond the targets laid down in the Kyoto Protocol,
they say. But more than that, aid policy for Africa as a whole needs a
complete rethink in climate change terms, because the continent is uniquely
vulnerable to climatic shifts, with 70 per cent of its people being
immediately dependent on rain-fed, small-scale agriculture.

Aid needs to be targeted in a new way, they insist, and what will be vital
in the future will not be big development projects, such as industrial-scale
agriculture, so much as steps to make small communities more resilient in
the face of potentially devastating rises in temperature or drops in
rainfall.

The report, Africa - Up In Smoke? insists that Tony Blair's two issues for
Gleneagles, African poverty and climate change, are inseparably linked, and
that the first cannot be solved without dealing with the second. In essence,
it is a frontal challenge to what one might call the Gordon Brown view of
the problem -- and indeed the Geldof view of the problem, for that matter --
which is that if only the economic basis of African development can be
properly sorted out by a properly responsible rich world, the continent will
come good.

It won't, says the report -- if we do not tackle the steadily warming
atmosphere.

The report has been produced by a coalition of 18 aid and green groups,
ranging from Oxfam and Action Aid to Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth,
which in a report last November broke new ground by recognising formally --
for the first time, as far as the aid groups were concerned -- that global
warming is now the most serious problem facing the poor of the Earth.

In the past, the development movement has taken environmental issues such as
climate change less seriously, with some senior figures -- even up to
ministerial level -- seeing it as a side issue. But now the reality of a
warming world, and its terrible risks for the people of the developing
world, are being accepted.

In their new report, the campaigners say that the G8 nations have failed to
"join the dots" between climate change and Africa and that unless global
warming is checked, development gains will disappear.

Archbishop Desmond Tutu says in the foreword: "It is important to understand
that Africa and climate change are intrinsically linked, as climate change
will affect the welfare of Africans for years to come." Western countries
have a moral obligation to act over global warming, he says, as these
wealthy countries have emitted more than their fair share of greenhouse
gases.

The report details the impact that climate change is soon to have, or indeed
is already having, across the continent.

It says the 14 African countries already subject to water stress or water
scarcity will be joined by a further 11 nations in the next 25 years.
Rainfall is predicted to decline in the Horn of Africa and some parts of the
south by as much as 10 per cent by 2050, while the land may warm by as much
as 1.6C, all of which is likely to affect the crop harvests for hundreds of
millions of people.

If, for example, temperatures rise by as much as 2C, the report says, large
areas of Kenya currently suited to growing tea would become unsuitable and
the impact on Kenya's economy would be enormous. (Tea provides nearly a
quarter of the country's export earnings.)

The sea level around the coast of Africa is projected to rise by 25cm by
2050, and the west coast, currently affected by storm surges and at risk
from extreme storm events, erosion and inundation, is likely to suffer even
more.

East Africa's coastal zone will also be affected: climatic variation and
sea-level rise may decrease coral reefs along the continental shelf,
reducing their buffer effects and increasing the likelihood of coastal
erosion.

All these factors, the report says, call for a new model of development in
Africa, in which strategies to increase human resilience in the face of
climate change and the stability of ecosystems are central.

It calls for a new test on every policy and project, in which the key
question will be: "Are you increasing or decreasing people's vulnerability
to the climate?"

Above all, it says, there must be a new flexibility, and not a
one-size-fits-all approach to development. "Just as an investment portfolio
spreads risk by including a variety of stocks and shares, so an agricultural
system geared to manage the risk of a changing climate requires a rich
diversity of approaches in terms of what is grown, and how it is grown."

Present aid policy doesn't do this, the report says. Andrew Simms, the
policy director of the New Economics Foundation, the report's lead author,
said: "What hasn't been thought through at all is whether the development
package attached to the proposed debt relief and increased aid-flows makes
people more or less vulnerable to climate change.

"Minor enhancements of debt relief pale into insignificance compared to the
negative impacts of global warming. Many places in Africa are overwhelmingly
dependent on rain-fed agriculture and so they are vulnerable to even the
early phases of climate change: any slight exaggeration of peaks and troughs
of climatic extremes hits them instantly.

"In talks about trade, for example, there has been a lot of emphasis on the
commercialisation of agriculture. But people have not thought about whether
the development of luxury horticulture from the west coast is going to
enhance the resilience of people in the face of massive shifts in climate,
when what you may really need is a massive amount of support to small-scale
agriculture."

The 18 charities, which together form the Working Group on Climate Change
and Development, are united in their view that the issues of African
development and global warming have to be linked -- yet are not.

Tony Juniper, the executive director of Friends of the Earth, said:
"Policies to end poverty in Africa are conceived as if the threat of
climatic disruption did not exist." Nicola Saltman of the World Wide Fund
for Nature added: "All the aid we pour into Africa will be inconsequential
if we don't tackle climate change."

In a further indictment, the charities say most of the world's eight richest
countries attending the G8 summit -- including Britain -- are already
dragging their feet in paying aid to the Third World for climate change. The
UK has pledged 10m to a special climate change fund, but so far has paid
nothing. Japan, the US, and Russia -- a signatory to the Kyoto agreement --
have refused to offer any cash. Germany has promised 5m (3.5m) but has paid
nothing to the special fund.

In spite of the billions in aid promised by Mr Brown, the charities call for
additional funds specifically for global warming and say that it could be
cheaper to provide defences before countries are inundated. The report cites
Mozambique which pleaded for aid to build coastal defences, but was
under-funded. That left the world facing a huge disaster-relief bill after
it was hit by floods.

The charities say they emerged from a private seminar with Mr Blair's
officials feeling disillusioned about the failure of Downing Street to grasp
the Africa-climate change agenda.

"The most depressing thing about it was that they took the view that it is
simply not possible to talk about the two issues in the same breath. They
said the media couldn't take it in and that it was too complicated," said
one source. "We were flabbergasted. They just don't seem to get it."

Mr Simms said: "In terms of the policies adopted for debt relief, all these
good intentions are flying blind when it comes to global warming.

"Unless they match their aid plans with more action on global warming, it
will blow their words to the winds. You cannot make poverty history unless
you stop runaway climate change."

'When ice falls from the sky, our income dries up'

Jack Karanga has not heard of global warming, the Kyoto Protocol or carbon
emissions. But he remembers a hailstorm a few years ago that shredded the
crop in the tea plantations around his home in the Kenyan highlands. His
wife and three children went hungry that year.

"I normally work six days a week, from 7am till 3pm picking tea," he said.
"On a good day, I pick 30kg and get paid 3.50 shillings a kilogram. Even
that Ksh105 (75p) is not enough to pay school fees and buy my children
clothes, but when the ice fell from the sky, I only had work for two days a
week. It was a hard time."

Kenya is the world's biggest exporter of tea. Its cool, damp highlands and
slightly acidic soil are the perfect conditions for tea growing, and
international companies such as Unilever have set up factories that buy the
leaves, dry them and then sell them at weekly auctions in Mombasa. From
there, the tea is blended and sold in three of the world's biggest
tea-drinking countries: Britain, Pakistan and Egypt.

Tea was grown commercially in Kenya by white settlers at the beginning of
the 20th century but it proved so profitable and easy to grow that, by the
1960s, subsistence farmers were setting aside part of their land to grow tea
for sale to tea factories built to buy from small farmers. Now, more than
half of Kenya's tea exports come from these tiny farms, where whole families
help pick the tea to pay for school fees and hospital bills. When the rains
fail or hailstones destroy crops, this tiny source of income dries up.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that Africa will
suffer more than the rest of the world from global warning.

And as temperatures rise, sea levels will rise, the moisture in the soil
will evaporate, and the rainfall will become more erratic -- crashing to
earth in downpours that wash away crops. As the lowlands dry up, farmers
will be forced to move into higher areas that are now covered with forests.
The ensuing deforestation will lead to soil erosion and the destruction of
some of the region's most important river channels.

Men such as Jack Karanga -- who wakes up and looks at the sky each morning
to figure out of the weather will be kind to him that day -- will soon learn
the hard way just what global warming means.

------------

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Published by David Sunfellow
NewHeavenNewEarth (NHNE)
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