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. 

Covid19 Pandemic Confirms an Overstretched Earth Systems

In the midst of threatening COVID-19 pandemic, we need honest reflections about the remote and immediate natural causes of the pandemic. We must acknowledge that our earth system is overstretched.

Photo credit: Science Photo Library

Our land-fields and oceans are inundated with plastic wastes. Our forest landscapes are facing high scale fragmentation and degradation, leading to unprecedented decline of ecosystems and biodiversity largely owing to illegal logging, reckless mining, human-induced wildfires, overpopulation, unsustainable subsistence farming and conversion of forests landscapes to commercial plantations. The Congo rainforest for instance lost over 165,000 km² between 2000 and 2014. Regrettably, this decline threatens the survival of a forest which is home to over 10,000 animals species, 600 tree species and have over 80 million people who depend solely on its natural ecosystem services for livelihood.

Photo credit phys. org

This scenario apparently, confirms that nature across most of the globe has been significantly altered by multiple human drivers with major indicators of ecosystem and biodiversity experiencing rapid decline alongside climate change exposing humanity to multiple risks. Honest reflections must include urgent inclusive actions to our ecosystem to reduce the cumulative impact of climate and degradation on landscapes, oceans, wetlands, habitats and species. The campaign planting one billion trees in Africa is a no-regret nature-based solution capable of repairing our broken ecological system and reduce multi-hazards including risk of pandemics such as COVID-19.

Photo credit: theecologist.org

Let's plant One Billion Trees and bring back nature to its full life. We can do it.
Watch the video of same on youtube https://youtu.be/cuA_UQn5bpM

Thank you for reading. Follow me on twitter @Tabijoda1 

Knowledge Exchange on Pruning Trees in Witzenhausen

Believe in Africa's Ability to Solve its Problems

UNU-INRA’s Director Dr. Fatima Denton Making the Point that Climate Action is Within Africa's Reach!

“Africa, Katowice and Climate Equity: The Dragon that Will Not Be Slayed!” 

In Katowice, the dismissal of science as an afterthought was a chilling reminder that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 1.5^oC Report is insufficient to disengage with ‘politics as usual’. IPCC’s stark warning that we have only 12 years to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees, and that even half a degree outside this temperature guardrail might trigger more climate crises in vulnerable regions like Africa, seemed to have fallen on deaf ears.

1.5 degrees is a relative metric, translating into net loss for Africa, given that most of its economic mainstay is predicated on cash crop earnings. In Ghana, extreme temperatures and seasonal droughts threaten the cocoa industry which employs almost 800,000 farmers and generates about $2 billion in foreign exchange annually. Many African countries are highly indebted, with Sub-Saharan Africa’s public debt averaging 57% of GDP in 2017, representing a huge challenge in realizing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, especially in combating climate change.

Why is Katowice so strikingly familiar?   

Is it all about equity? Well, perhaps not entirely. Even in a democratized, bottom-up process, the constant bickering over narrow interests remains a strong undercurrent. The 2015 Paris Climate Conference was a triumph of the collective, moving from intentions to concrete actions. Transitioning from “Intended Nationally Determined Contributions” (INDC) to “Nationally Determined Contributions” (NDC) has signalled this new wave.

Many developing countries have outlined more ambitious NDCs than they can afford, evidenced in the unconditional Nationally Determined Contributions––financing climate action without donor funding.  Yet, the IPCC 1.5 report highlights the disproportionate plight of the world’s vulnerable populations, indigenous peoples, and local communities dependent on agricultural or coastal livelihoods under 1.5°C global warming. West Africa, for instance, has been identified as a climate-change hotspot highly likely to suffer from decreasing crop yields and production. Katowice has re-imposed climate justice on to the menu – not as a choice, but as a sharp warning that leaving this ‘entrée’ out of the ‘main course’ will send the negotiations back into the squandered years of political back pedalling.

Rich versus poor – old battles lines re-drawn

The climate negotiations have often taken a binary approach between those who created the mess and those that should assume the burden of cleaning up. Countries peripheralized before, during and after the Industrial Revolution have to pay for the price of being doubly ‘annexed’ – first through the ‘extraction’ of their commodities and raw materials, which sustained the Industrial Revolution, and second by a determination to keep the revolution exclusive to economies that had the buying power to buy themselves out of the underdevelopment of their working classes. The historical emissions and carbon footprint of industrialized nations have taken a huge toll on the people least able to reconfigure new development models or to redesign their own atmospheric space. Countries in Africa, on the margins of economic development, even with a dozen economies rising to catch up, will still be caught in starter block mode in the face of devastating climate impacts. Many would have joined the race simply too late to make a significant difference in insulating their economies with the relevant financial muscle, infrastructure, technologies, information, and knowledge to win the race against climate change.  Katowice has laid open old battle lines, and requalified equity as intangibly related to any form of climate action.  Countries, signatories to the Paris Agreement are still concerned with financial and political economy considerations and collective responsibility is often expressed in hollow terms. Climate finance, strongly correlated with equity, remains a critical consideration.

‘Moving forward with the same bad ideas’ or creating spaces for new voices?

It is hard to be optimistic in the light of Katowice’s weak outcomes, which lost sight of the IPCC 1.5^oC report’s call for urgency – even the agreement on the Paris rulebook had to be forceps delivered. As Greta Thunberg argues: ‘you only talk about moving forward with the same bad ideas that got us into this mess, even when the only sensible thing to do is pull the emergency brake’. We must take a step back to re-examine impractical instruments of the negotiations. Take NDCs for example.  According to the African Development Bank latest report,  49 African countries out of 54 have ratified their NDCs, with an estimated cost of USD 4 trillion to meet adaptation and mitigation targets by 2030.  Who will foot that bill? The contradiction between NDCs and international action is all too apparent. After all, the Paris Agreement is not a binding treaty.

Climate leadership is not a western preserve. Africa has an opportunity to take the findings of the 1.5^oC report and use it towards safer growth. The continent needs strong leaders- not afraid to design climate action that rhymes with prosperity. Africa has everything to gain from a new climate momentum –taking into account current megatrends related to urbanization, demography and youth employment to better anticipate and potentially blunt climate impacts. We are witnessing greater ingenuity and innovation across the continent. An unprecedented level of internet and mobile connectivity has led to the mushrooming of tech hubs with currently 442 active hubs across the continent, and the rise of a new breed of entrepreneurs, with 7 out of 10 young Africans that are self-employed.

 Our time on earth is transient. We are mere ‘caretakers’ of a planet that we must bequeath to a new set of caretakers. Fossil-fuel powered economic prosperity is being challenged from all sides, even at a time when some African countries are ‘courting’ new discoveries of oil and gas. The burden of responsibility to act now and widen the space to ‘old’ and ‘new’ stakeholders, not least the private sector and the youth, is a current as strong as climate change itself. If we ignore this call, we do so at our peril. 

By Dr Fatima Denton 

Director of United Nations University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa (UNU-INRA) Accra, Ghana. 

What African Leaders are doing so wrong

So far in the last 10 years, over 34000 Africans mostly youth got stranded or died before, during or after an attempt to migrate across the Mediterranean.

In same last ten years, over 400million youth are unemployed. Sadly, Africa's youth population is fast rising and could reach 1 billion by 2030 -2050 far above earlier projections.

The sad reality is our governments don't want to hear these truths which they know so well. What do they do?

They fool the people by doing some cosmetic infrastructure works with Chinese companies that bring their water from China, bring their labour from China, bring their equipments from China, and take back all money to China. So whom does this benefit?

Instead of thinking smart and investing in human capital they waste these quick and dirty loans from China and wherever to buy guns, bullets, pepper spray and construct barricades, and position armed policemen or soldiers in all corners of the country in the name of security.

What security in guns when the critical mass of people are hungry, desperate, and frustrated?

Parents go hungry to sponsor their children in school and when they graduate they can't get a job;

But the senate buildings are glittering with gold and senators are each paid allowances that could pay salaries for 150 people per month but they aren't thinking so;

MPs each collect allowances that could construct a community hospital each month;

Ministers seat on heavy budgets most of which is squandered on doing press conferences, galas, or hiring all the press and security to commission a borehole;

Our Seating Presidents torture, maim, jail, exile, accuse or kill any opposition challenge or youths peacefully demonstrating asking for basic rights;

Some presidents want to rule for life, rent big hotels abroad, buy presidential jets that yield no benefit to the public; yet there are no good roads, no good hospitals, no good schools, no good housing most people live in squalor, and we are now seeing more street children and homeless people sleeping under trees and bridges.

We have presidents that cannot think beyond borrowing and beyond talking trash in speeches that can't plant a tree or put food on the table....

Now they are selling over Africa to China.............Just to mention these few......

When African youth will rise to the streets, all their armed personnel and guns and even if they combine all the guns in Europe and china that will not be able to stop the anger of these critical mass of desperate people. I've repeated that the Arab spring was just the tip of the iceberg of what sub Saharan Africa will experience if our leaders continue with this unfortunate behavior.

Achieveing Resilience and Sustainable Livelihood through Landscapes Restoration

Apparently, most people don't view landscapes in term of their multi-functionality, as they provide many benefits apart from just water management, forestry, ecosystem services and agriculture. Today, one billion people on our planet go hungry. Perhaps another one billion suffer from hidden hunger in which vitamins and minerals are insufficient in their diet, causing physical and mental harm. Between 2006 and 2016, world prices for soybeans, wheat, maize and rice climbed to roughly triple their historical levels.  With global food prices towering, the social order in many countries is breaking down. This is evident in increased violent clashes between farmers and grazers across Africa, and it is about same time Boko haram insurgency erupted in Nigeria, and present deepening economic crises across the African region.   

Diverse factors converge to affect the production, demand and distribution of food. But the critical needs of a growing African population would have to be satisfied as decisive resources such as water, land and energy become increasingly scarce. It means our food systems must be sustainable to avoid an unprecedented confluence of pressures leading to more violence in the next 15 years.

The challenges of soil erosion, loss of soil fertility and other related land degradation activities are huge. Rates of water extraction for irrigation exceed rates of replenishment; overgrazing, pests and diseases are a serious concern. Our increasingly unsustainable food production systems will compromise the capacity to produce enough food in the future. That means there will be more forced migration, grazer/farmer clashes, disasters, poverty and violence across Africa. The question now is where do we turn for the right solutions? 

The solution is not just to produce more food, or change diets; but to produce more food from less land, less labour, less cost and less degradation of the landscapes. But we must recognize the fact that producing enough food so that everyone can potentially be fed is not the same thing as ensuring food security for all. The potential threats are enormous that all areas of the food system must be addressed. High priority must be given to landscape restoration as a driver of broad-based income grower, people inclusiveness and stimulator of social cohesion. If we must reverse the trends of poverty, hunger, forced migration; human displacements, disasters and diseases already rife in Africa, and build sustainable livelihood and resilience in our communities, we must ensure there is adequate stability in food prices; and food supplies should be sustainably affordable to protect the most vulnerable. This is impossible when landscapes are degraded. It requires managing biodiversity and ecosystem services, climate adaptation and disaster risk reduction.

If ever there was a time to recognize the crucial role of our landscapes, I daresay this is the time. It requires bold and actionable decisions by political leaders, business leaders, researchers, support from youths, women everywhere to plant new trees to restore our forest landscapes.  We are already planting 100 million trees for Africa. A little action from you can make a huge difference. https://100milliontrees4africa.wordpress.com/ 

Thank you. Tabi Joda