BY STAFF REPORTER
Recent reports indicate that the southern parts of the country, especially the Guji and Borana zones of Oromia State are suffering from severe drought. The disaster is believed to be induced by the impacts of climate change.
In addition to Ethiopia, many other developing countries especially those in Africa are said to be victims of similar impacts of climate change. What is more alarming is that these countries are facing the problem for which they have a very low contribution. As a result countries of the world, whether developed or developing have joined hands to curb the impact of climate change which is equally destructive to all regardless of their contribution.
Climate change is now recognized as an equity issue because the world’s poorest people, those who contributed least to the atmospheric buildup of greenhouse gases, are the least equipped to deal with the negative impacts of climate change. Wealthier nations that have historically contributed the most to global warming are better able to adapt to the impacts. Addressing disparities between developed and developing countries is integral to the success of global climate change mitigation and adaptation.
Sustainable development in Africa cannot be addressed effectively without accounting for the impacts of climate change on agriculture, conflicts and disease patterns, all of which have a particular impact on the poor. Sustainable development and adaptation are mutually reinforcing; an important conclusion of IPCC is that adaptation measures if taken up in the sustainable development framework, can diminish negative impacts from future climate change.
“Climate change is having a growing impact on the African continent, hitting the most vulnerable hardest, and contributing to food insecurity, population displacement and stress on water resources. In recent months we have seen devastating floods, an invasion of desert locusts and now face the looming spectre of drought because of a La Niña event. The human and economic toll has been aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
Water resources in particular comprise one sector that is highly dependent on and influenced by climate change. Several countries in Africa already experience considerable water stress as a result of insufficient and unreliable rainfall that changes rainfall patterns or causes flooding. Climate change is real, and its impact is already being felt. It has affected the people of Africa and its food systems that are already vulnerable.
The United Nations Development Programme warns that the progress in human development achieved over the last decade may be slowed down or even reversed by climate change, as new threats emerge to water and food security, agricultural production and access, and nutrition and public health. The impacts of climate change – sea-level rise, droughts, heatwaves, floods and rainfall variation – could by 2080 push another 600 million people into malnutrition and increase the number of people facing water scarcity by 1.8 billion.16 A variety of climate and non-climatic processes influence flood processes, resulting in river floods, flash floods, urban floods, sewer floods, glacial lake outburst floods and coastal floods.
The whole world has now come to terms with the fact that climate is a borderless, global issue. Likewise, the countries should act together to avert the impacts. Accordingly, they meet annually to discuss relevant issues to which they have entered a commitment to address climate change.
While climate change caused anywhere harm to countries everywhere, the countries of the world have agreed that they should act together and have started taking action. Especially since 2015, at the COP21 Summit in Paris, they have inked an agreement called the Paris agreement through which they have specified their roles to the global commitment of halting climate change entitled Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC).
As nations gather for the latest round of climate talks in Glasgow, a new report by the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has called for urgent efforts to increase the financing and implementation of actions designed to adapt to the growing impacts of climate change.
Under the Paris Agreement, countries submitted climate pledges. These initial pledges all begin in 2020, but cover a variety of periods, from five to fifteen years.
The term common time frame appears in the Paris Agreement (Article 4) to denote the Parties’ agreed time to implement climate change measures described in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), according to climatalk.org. Article 4, Paragraph 9 of the Paris Agreement calls on countries to communicate an NDC every five years, and countries that use a ten-year time frame are still required to submit five-year interim targets. However, the Paris Agreement does not define a common implementation period or “time frame”. As a result, the first round of NDCs covers time frames that end in either 2025 or 2030.
The Rwandan environment minister Jeanne d’Arc Mujawamariya will co-lead the talks on common timeframes, the issue of how often countries’ official NDC climate plans should be updated and what period they should cover. The main options are five years or ten with a halfway point.
More ambitious countries tend to want shorter periods, while some object to the bureaucracy and say ten years fits better with their domestic planning processes.
Five-year time frames are favoured, among others, by the Least Developed Country Group (LDC), the Africa Group, the Environmental Integrity Group, the Independent Alliance of Latin America and the Caribbean (AILAC), the United States (US) and Brazil, many of which represent Parties most affected by the climate crisis.
A shorter time frame would help to avoid lock-in of an insufficient level of commitment, prompting Parties to ratchet up their ambitions more regularly. Other Parties, such as Japan and Russia, have stated their preference for ten-year time frames, arguing that it fits better with their national planning.
Considering the relative urgency of the impact of climate change on developing countries it is important for countries of the world to approve the five years Common Timeframe for the updating of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of each country.
The Ethiopian Herald November 10/2021
