Climate change is at the back bone of Africa's development
Adrian Nzamba is from Tanzania and currently takes part in the Global Change education carried out at MS' Global Platform in Copenhagen, Denmark.As I, among the people from Africa, see the way my brothers and sisters struggle from day to day in order to sustain their lives through farming, business and so on, it has made me wonder why the future of my people is not getting better. In recent years there has been an increase in the number of floods, which has lead to the destruction of infrastructures such as roads, telecommunication lines and so on.
If you take a look at the back bone activity of most of the people living in Africa, you will find that these people depend on agriculture as their main source of income, and you will also find that in recent years, due to the reduction of the annual rainfall, the yields from these activities have reduced dramatically.
Most countries in Africa are using hydroelectric power generators as the source of power. These days, people can go for whole weeks without power in different cities. The generators cannot produce enough power, because the big dams and rivers dry out when it’s not raining.
One of the causes behind the recent conflicts in African countries lies in the fact that people are fighting for a better place with natural resources like water and fertile soil. So due to the fact that most areas are drying up, people are already moving and fighting for the areas which have not yet being affected by the shortage of water or by the rising temperature causing the area to dry up.
These major problems hindering Africa's development as a continent can all be linked as the effect of the climate changes which are now happening in different parts of the world – and again Africa is among the most affected places. But what is climate? To my understanding, climate is the weather experienced over a long period and climate change is the change of weather in an area due to causes such as the harmful emission of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide mainly from fossil fuel – and land use change e.g. deforestations.
Most of the problems in Africa can in one way or another be linked or explained by the climate changes happening now. And already now, people in Africa are suffering from these changes, if not dying because of drought or floods. A question is: who caused these climate changes? It has been shown that climate change is the results of the past emission of carbon dioxide by the industrialized countries – as their industries used lots of coal to produce energy – but due to their geographical location they are not affected by these changes in the same way as Africa and other parts of the world are affected, although we are not responsible for these emissions to the atmosphere.
Since the industrialized countries are responsible for the climate change, a climate debt has been estimated so that the responsible countries should pay the ones that are affected by these climate changes. This means that the rich, industrialized developed countries should pay what they owe to the developing countries so that they can adapt to climate change, for instance in different places in Africa.
Right now Denmark is hosting one of the most important conferences in our lifetime – the COP15. Politicians meet and try to come up with a deal regarding reduction of Carbon Dioxide emission as well as funds for adapting to climate changes. If the deal won’t be fair for the developing countries including Africa, it means that the world will allow the suffering to increase in Africa.
Right now, Copenhagen is the place to campaign, making the industrialized countries pay their debt to Africa and other developing countries, so that they can adopt and develop. Let us fight; because delay kills and we have no time to delay, climate change is happening now – and now is when we need action.
