World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought is observed every year on 17 June to spread awareness among people about the cooperation required to combat desertification and the effects of drought. No doubt that desertification and climate change or global warming are the main problems seen globally and affect all regions of the world.
According to Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nation report at United Nations Climate Change Conference 2015, climate change or the risks of global warming could jeopardize decades of development efforts, particularly in the poorest regions of the planet. It is therefore vital to ensure that development projects strengthen their beneficiaries’ capacities to confront climate change.
Climate change is disproportionately affecting the world’s poorest countries that bear the brunt of its effects while having contributed the least to its causes. These are Small Island developing states, landlocked countries, arid and semi-arid areas and countries where people are most dependent on natural resources.
The world’s most vulnerable people who are the first and hardest hit by climate change are the same people who provide the bulk of the planet’s food: family farmers, pastoralists, fisher folk and community foresters.
Ethiopia has been identified as one of the most vulnerable countries to climate variability and change and is frequently faced with climate-related hazards, commonly drought and floods. The variability of rainfall and the increasing temperature were a cause for frequent drought and famine and putting a disastrous impact on the livelihood of the peoples.
On World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought, Trócaire reports about a visit to a life-changing water project in Ethiopia and the need for Climate Justice.
Where there is water there is life is an ancient saying. In fact, historically many of the world’s earliest settlements were based alongside water sources and rivers. Some of the earliest evidence of human settlement was in Ethiopia, the country known as the ‘cradle of civilization.’
Ethiopia today, however, is facing many challenges. Climate change is challenging the very fabric of many societies and clean water is becoming increasingly absent for so many people around the world. According to the WHO, three in ten people in the world lack access to safe water at home. Six in ten lack safely managed sanitation.
People in developing countries suffer the most. Inadequate water supply leads to food shortage, potentially famine, ecological decline, and conflict over resources.
Trócaire’s Seán Farrell wrote that “I traveled to Northern Ethiopia to visit a community in Adigrat. Here I saw a small reservoir, which had pipes running for 5 km bringing water and life to green crops. It moved me to see this simple reservoir providing support to hundreds of families.”
Trócaire, with the support of Department for international development (DFID) UKAID Match funding, is working with poor communities like Adigrat across Northern Ethiopia. In places where harvests are regularly destroyed by increasing droughts and lack of rainfall, this DFID program is helping communities to respond.
Communities are now conserving soil, harvesting animal fodder and finding new ways to farm. They are becoming more resilient to the droughts that are increasing in intensity and frequency.
“I walked to a river dam where water is trapped and then used to grow a vast array of crops. I saw the work that rural communities had done in building terraces on the sides of mountains that trap water and assist food to grow even in times of drought. This work is overwhelming and is making a real difference to so many lives.
“But we must also reflect on our own lifestyles. The families I met in Northern Ethiopia have contributed almost nothing to the footprint of climate change. But they are paying the highest price. This is one of the great moral questions of our time. We must act now in our own lives, and we must demand political action to halt climate change,” he said.
Each Irish person is responsible for as much carbon emissions as 88 Ethiopians, meaning that it would take 404 million Ethiopians over four times the population of that country to match Ireland’s carbon footprint.
“We know this is not sustainable. We in Ireland are the 8th highest carbon emitter per capita in Europe and the 35th highest globally. We are significantly off-track for meeting our 2020 emission reduction targets.
“We cannot sit on the fence and ignore this reality. In places such as Adigrat over 80 percent of the population depend on the rains to survive, and climate change has had devastating effects on the lives and livelihoods of poor people.
“We must continue to work with these communities to help them to adapt and cope with this reality. Yet we must also call on our own leaders to deliver national policies and action in Ireland so that we too can play our part in tackling this global challenge.”
At the national level, the World Bank suggests that climate change may reduce Ethiopia’s GDP compared to a baseline scenario by 2-6 percent by 2015, and by up to 10 percent by 2045. The most vulnerable sectors to climate variability and change in the country are agriculture, water, and human health.
To cope up the effects of climate change, adaptation and mitigation measures are being practiced in the country. At the higher level, the government has signed and ratified all the Rio Conventions, namely the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Protocol, the Bio-diversity Convention and the Conventions to Combat Desertification.
Following these, the government has initiated the Climate- Resilient Green Economy both to adapt and mitigate climate change. There are also different adaptation measures undertaking by different peoples at different levels.
To mitigate or combat desertification and climate change, Ethiopia has been striving to achieve reforestation and possibly soil conservation activities which would have strong synergies in adaptation and could bring in the needed finance for adaptation precisely because mitigation has a value on international carbon markets and in new programs on reduced emissions from deforestation and soil degradation, show an assessment report for a community-level Project in Guduru, Oromia Ethiopia about Climate Risks and Development Projects.
The Ethiopian Herald June 20/2019
BY ESSEYE MENGISTE
