Shein: Help Africa cope with climate change

04 March 2010, The Citizen
URL: http://thecitizen.co.tz/newe.php?id=17639

Dar es Salaam: The developed world has been urged to assist African countries cope with the emerging environmental challenges triggered by climate change, which is blamed for prolonged droughts and devastating floods.

Vice-President Ali Mohamed Shein said yesterday that the continent could not fully embrace the new practices and technologies to stave off climate-related disasters because of low technical capacity and limited resources.

"Our countries are too poor and have very limited means to deal with environmental disasters. For our people, eking out a living from arid lands is already a difficult task," he said when he graced the Africa Environment Day activities being marked at here at the continental level.

He said Africa, the world's poorest continent, was highly vulnerable to the impact of climate change with agriculture, its economic backbone, having to contend with poor rains, floods, pests and diseases, leading to poor yields.

Land resources contributed up to 50 per cent of household food security in Africa as 70 per cent of the continent's population depended on agriculture for their livelihood, Shein said.

The agricultural sector is not only critical to the livelihoods of the local people but is also the mainstay of the economies of the majority of the countries, contributing 10 to 70 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP).

"But agriculture is mostly subsistence and highly dependent on rainfall by over 95 per cent. It is for this reason that agriculture in Africa is highly vulnerable to changes in climate variability, seasonal shifts and precipitation patterns," he said.

He added that unpredictable weather patterns were largely to blame for food insecurity and heightened risks of famine for much of sub-Saharan Africa whose agricultural productivity had not been good even in the best of times.

The United Nations has projected that yields from rain-fed agriculture in some African countries will drop by 50 per cent by 2020 as a result of the impact of continued climate change.

The most vulnerable countries are those in the semi-arid regions of the continent where droughts, heat waves, storms and increased temperatures have disrupted crop cultivation, leading to famines.

One third of the Africa population, currently estimated at 800 million, live in drought prone areas such as the Sahel belt, the Horn of Africa and southern Africa. Large areas of East Africa, including some parts of Tanzania, are also categorised as semi-arid lands.

The UN has further projected that by 2020 between 75 and 250 million people in the semi-arid zones of the continent will be exposed to increased water stress, adversely affecting their livelihoods and exacerbating water-related problems.

"Let me call upon the international community to listen to the cries of those who are suffering from the impacts of climate change as well as to the industrialised countries to take up positions of responsibility on all of these critical issues," Dr Shein said.

The Vice-President, who led the country's delegation to the recent World Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen, said the high-profile conference organised by the UN was a wakeup call to save the Earth.

Africa Environment Day was mooted in 2002 during the African Union (AU) during its summit in Durban, South Africa in order  to sensitise the policy makers, development partners, experts and the general public on the major environmental challenges facing the continent.

Earlier, Arusha Regional Commissioner Isidore Shirima told delegates from the continent and beyond that the recent drought which devastated much of the northern regions was among the impacts of climate change.