Transcript of Tabi Joda's intervention at the Connected Talks on Climate Crises, Nexus and Anticipatory Action with UNOCHA, IFRC, Concern Worldwide, Mercy Corps and One Billion Trees for Africa

 The impact of climate change on communities and ecosystems, as well as the challenges that communities have in accessing climate finance

I want to start by asking a rather provocative question: What will you do if you were a rural woman and your child is sick and hungry and you are caught up in between to the hard choice to either buy food or buy medicine which cost same?  

The impacts of climate change are massive. The increasing frequency and intensity of extreme weather events, and multi-hazards such as heat waves, droughts, and floods hit local communities the most.

Local communities are mostly farmers, artisans, fishers, and pastoralists and they depend largely on their natural ecosystem services for food, income and wellbeing. Regrettably, increasing climate impacts drive ecosystem and biodiversity loss, resulting to land degradation, water scarcity, pasture loss, wildfires, dryness, and proliferation of invasive species in these local contexts.   

Unfortunately, local farmers depend on rain-fed agriculture and as a result of weather variability exacerbated by changing climate, we see increasing cases of rain deficit and in other instances, rain excess – both presenting an extreme disorder either causing crop loss or poor harvest.

As a result, this critical mass of vulnerable people face conditions of food insecurity,  poverty and suffering. You can imagine what it means for a family of 6, 8 10 or so to spend a post harvest season with insufficient food to feed the family. And here we are talking of societies where it is mostly women who are doing these jobs. It is only what the farm, river or forest produces that they sell in the market and they depend on such trivial income to pay school fee for children, or buy medicine, or buying clothes, and other basic needs.

When the farm doesn’t produce enough, they either resort to chopping down the forest to sell, resulting to deforestation and desertification which further complicates the climate impacts. And when this persists, there is obvious resources scarcities interlinking with social inequalities and economic desperation consequently leading to unhealthy or unethical competition over such scarce resources, like water, fertile agriculture lands, pasture fields or fish rich waters, which at the end could lead to violent conflicts that cause loss of lives, loss of economic investments or the migration of rural dwellers. 

Imagine a that rural mother cited above who depends on harvesting and selling ginger for her annual income, and she's standing in between the hard choice of using the limited money she has sold the little crops to pay school fee for her child or to buy malaria medicine for the child.  

And here is Covid19 that presents a new complex scenario in an already fragile situation of multi-hazards, climate risk and fragility. Regrettably, the virus is traced to consequences of degradation of our ecosystems and climate system. Consequently, we are all in this today, but those at the local communities are trapped the more because every market day, they need to go to sell and buy, but recent covid restrictions was more of a grave price to people who have contributed less to the climate crises. Take for instance, or imagine a situation where you want to save someone’s live from dying to covid19, but the next day that person is dead in a flood disaster. So we must acknowledge how climate driven degradations are hampering livelihoods of these vulnerable local communities.

It is clear how communities suffer climate impacts but it even gets worse with the challenges of accessing climate finance. Most climate funds end up in administrative works than on-the-ground work for the communities it is meant. Donor agencies often give very tough conditionality that local communities hardly meet up with.

-       Climate finance access often get delayed through government bureaucratic processes that end up thwarting project targets. For example, if seeds are needed before planting season and due to bureaucratic delays, seeds come when farming season is over, then the whole purpose gets defeated. Timely availability of finance to implement projects at due time is key, and getting the funds directly to communities through their own community-led processes is very vital. There is no point giving someone something when they don’t need it. Communities must be at the center stage of any climate adaptation projects because they are the people are higher risk of climate impacts but they have contributed less to the climate crises. Thank you for listening.