In a new report "Africa - Up in Smoke", it repeats the prediction of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that, "the effects of climate change are expected to be greatest in developing countries in terms of loss of life and relative effects on investment and economy", with Africa, the world's poorest region, being "the continent most vulnerable to the impacts of projected change because widespread poverty limits adaptation capabilities".
The Oxfam report, written in conjunction with the New Economics Foundation, highlights the dangers of climate change: "small-scale farming provides most of the food produced in Africa, as well as employment for 70 per cent of working people.
These simple facts, coupled with farming being overwhelmingly dependent on direct rainfall, mean that Africa is exceptionally vulnerable to the uncertainties and weather extremes of global warming".
However, agricultural vulnerability is not the only problem.
The report points out that Africa's "high sensitivity to climate is exacerbated by other factors such as widespread poverty, recurrent droughts and floods, an immediate daily dependence on natural resources and biodiversity, a heavy disease burden, and the numerous conflicts that have engulfed the continent. There are further complications introduced by an unjust international trade system and the burden of unpayable debt".
Oxfam and NEF considers that these factors require a new model of development in which human resilience in the face of climate change and the stability of ecosystems are central. The report also calls for more flexibility and a dropping of the one-size-fits-all, neoliberal-driven approach to development.
For Oxfam and NEF, Mozambique is an example of a "country of progress and possibilities, a flagship of renewal in Africa". The report looks at the community of Nwadjahane in Gaza Province, which was set up in the 1980s following displacement from surrounding areas during the war of destabilisation.
According to the report, "over the years, villagers have had to live with political and economic instability, drought, and major flood and storm damage. Despite these difficult circumstances, villagers have developed creative and innovative ways of coping and adapting to this uncertainty and change".
Researchers found that in Nwadjahane there has been a fundamental shift away from cash payments to "traditional" forms of non-cash bartering. Part of this change has been put down to increasingly frequent and severe droughts, floods, and storms leading to either less cash being available from crop sales, or simply the need for more labour to replant or repair damaged crops or farm infrastructure.
The report also covers other moves by African governments to tackle the problems associated with climate change, such as improving weather forecasting. However, the report states "there is a consensus among development groups that a greater and more urgent challenge is strengthening communities from the bottom-up, and building on their own coping strategies to live with global warming. The need to give much more support to small-scale farming comes up again and again from the field experience of development groups, along with the priority for access to energy from sustainable sources".
The report also covers the need for the international community to fund disaster management ahead of a crisis. It points out that Britain, other European nations and the United States, spend millions of pounds on reducing the risks associated with floods, earthquakes and droughts. Yet, in contrast, very little international aid gets spent on helping poor communities do the same.
The report illustrates this point by showing that six months before the Mozambique flood disaster of February 2000, the Government appealed to the international community for 2.7 million US dollars in a contingency plan, preparing for possible disasters, but received less than half this amount. After the floods Mozambique received 100 million dollars in emergency assistance and a further 450 million was pledged for rehabilitation.
For the authors, current spending priorities are perverse: "for every dollar spent on preparing for disaster, a further seven dollars is saved in the cost of recovering from it. Yet, as in the case of Mozambique, requests for resources to prepare for disasters before the great floods went seriously under-funded, leaving a huge disaster-relief bill to be paid after the floods".
The OXFAM report comes as Nicholas Stern, a former senior economist with the World Bank, warns the British government that "the possibility of avoiding a global catastrophe is "already almost out of reach".
His report warns that ignoring global warming could turn 200 million people into refugees as their homes are hit by drought or flood.
The report, commissioned by the British government and published on Monday, predicts that climate change could cut world production by between five and 20 per cent. Stern's findings are stark: "our actions over the coming few decades could create risks of major disruption to economic and social activity, later in this century and in the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars and the economic depression of the first half of the 20th Century".
According to the economist, the cost of avoiding catastrophe would be equivalent to just one per cent of global production.
The human cost of failing to act is enormous. If the world's temperature rises by 2 to 3 degrees centigrade from pre-industrial levels, rising sea levels from melting ice sheets could threaten the homes of one in every twenty people. The cost for the planet would also be extreme, with between 15 and 40 per cent of species facing extinction.
SOURCE: AIM
