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Sifelani Tsiko Senior Writer
Zimbabwe has made a huge step towards establishing a national climate policy after finalising the draft National Climate Change Response Strategy following extensive public consultations to input into the process of developing a comprehensive action plan on climate change issues.

Stakeholders who took part in a series of national consultative workshops on the draft climate change strategy were upbeat that the plan will eventually support efforts aimed at establishing a national climate policy.

Prof Sarah Feresu, director of the University of Zimbabwe Institute of Environmental Studies which was tasked by the Government to spearhead the development of the National Climate Change Response Strategy (NCCRS), said the strategy was finalised in the first half of this year.

“By March, we should be able to hand over the document to you (Permanent Secretary for Environment, Water and Climate Mr Prince Mupazviriho),” she was quoted saying earlier this year.

Climate change experts met on various occasions to fine-tune the draft and mainstream climate change into policy and sectoral development plans.

This comprehensive NCCRS includes six sub-sectors that cover water resources, agriculture, gender, youth and vulnerable groups, education and awareness, human settlement and governance.

Under the plans were such aspects as the national adaptation plan, technology action plan, finance, a policy and regulatory framework, and a knowledge management and capacity building component.

The climate change strategy aims to produce concrete mitigation and adaptation actions integrated into long-term economic planning processes to support a low carbon, climate resilient development pathway. The strategy will ultimately feed into the national climate policy which aims to promote the main-streaming of climate and climate change issues into national development plans.

The document will aim to improve the policy framework for the introduction of climate protection measures guided by priorities and principles laid out under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate and the Kyoto Protocol.

Secretary in the Ministry of Environment, Water and Climate, Mr Prince Mupazvirihwo told the first consultative workshop recently that the national climate policy will enable Zimbabwe to respond more strategically and in a unified manner to the impact of climate change.

“The importance of climate science in advising and addressing climate change issues cannot be over emphasised and climate change being a cross-cutting issue calls for the need for effective national dialogue, consultations and harmonisation of policies from other sectors,” he said.

Development of climate change policies, Prof Feresu says, will ensure responding to climate change is central to the development vision of the country, and included in policies, budgets, poverty alleviation measures and investment decisions across government agencies and departments at national, provincial and local levels.

At a consultative workshop held earlier this year, Mr Mupazviriho reiterated Government’s commitment to the finalisation of the draft.

“We need to be thorough as we endeavour to finalise the document and to ensure that priority and critical issues and identified possible policy focus areas for each sector as well as action plans have been properly formulated,” he says.

“It is our Climate Change Response Strategy and our responsibility to ensure its robustness to address the climate change concerns of the country.”

A series of consultative workshops which were held were aimed at discussing and formulating a policy in the interest of addressing the issues of climate in the country.

Zimbabwe started the process of developing the NCCRS in 2012 and the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of Zimbabwe was contracted to lead the process.

Country-wide consultative workshops were held to gather ideas on how best the country could design comprehensive and strategic approaches on climate change adaptation, mitigation, technology, financing as well as public education awareness.

Zimbabwe was already experiencing the effects of climate change, notably rainfall variability and extreme events such as droughts and floods.

Climate experts say these conditions, combined with warming trends could seriously harm the country’s agricultural sector and impact negatively on livelihoods.

Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) climate change advisor Dr Mclay Kanyangarara says his organisation will continue to support Zimbabwe in its response to climate change-related problems.

“There is no doubt that this is a very crucial process that Zimbabwe has engaged in,” he says.

“The process is yours as Zimbabweans, the product is yours as Zimbabweans.

“The question is, what are you going to do with the National Climate Change Response Strategy. Are you going to leave it to gather dust or it is going to spur you to do something?”

He says climate change finance mobilisation should be at the core of the climate strategy.

“Without the means of mobilising money, how are you going to implement the climate project,” Dr Kanyangarara says.

“We need a good mix of internal resources from Government and others complimented by resources from external sources.”

He further says that eliciting private sector participation is crucial in strengthening the country’s strategic response to climate change-related issues.

“We do not seem to bring the private sector on board but we tend to rely more on donor’s money,” the Comesa climate change advisor says.

“We need to include the private sector for this strategy to work.”

Environmental specialist within the Environment and Land Support Unit (ELSU) of the United Nations Development Programme Ms Daisy Mukarakate says Zimbabwe needs a costed climate change action plan to ensure that the strategy is implemented.

“We need to have a costed action plan for climate change to ensure implementation,” she says.

“UNDP supports the climate change strategy and there is need to build capacity to mobilise climate finance.” The development of the NCCRS has been a complex process and environmentalists remain optimistic that the process is nearing completion.

“The consultation process has really been a journey in terms of rigorous debate, criticism and re-alignment of climate change issues,” says Mrs Naomi Chimbetete, an environmentalist.

“It has provided all stakeholders with an opportunity to participate in and contribute to the finalisation of Zimbabwe’s NCCRS.”

The NCCRS task team, she says, has done a massive job bringing all of these priorities and anomalies out, resolving them and coming up with a cohesive document that should help the country respond to climate change issues well.

The NCCRS was open for discussions and suggestions were invited from people from all quarters.

The finalisation of the draft now involved consolidating a series of specific areas into short and more concise statements.

Among other key issues, the NCCRS task team is now fine-tuning key components and overall aims and principles of the strategy, cross-cutting issues, community engagement and sustainable development and other subject specific policies on climate-related issues.

The intended outcome will be an improved, up-to-date and robust national climate change response strategy for enabling development.

Zimbabwe is getting more vulnerable to climatic changes and local climatologists predict sectoral impacts affecting various sectors from environment, agriculture and food security, health, water resources, economic activities, human migration and physical infrastructure.

Zimbabwe and most other African countries are particularly vulnerable to climate change because of high dependence on rain-fed agriculture.

Experts say the damaging effects of climate change will play out in the coming decades pushing the majority of the poor into extreme poverty.

Climate change will over time ratchet up the risks and vulnerabilities of the poor in Africa and elsewhere in the developing world exerting pressure on already over-stretched coping strategies and magnifying inequalities.

A Care International specialist in poverty, environment and climate change says as many as 250 million people in Africa may not have enough water to meet their basic needs by 2020 because of climate change. He says day-to-day impacts of climate change, such as higher temperatures and erratic rainfall, droughts and floods are increasing many people’s vulnerability to the hazard.

And environmentalists can only hope that climate change action plans will provide an answer to this complex but devastating natural phenomenon.
“We have been work-shopping so much and I hope we will get the right output,” says Prof Feresu.

“We want to reduce it, synthesise it and crystallize it into a smart document that will be viewed as a product of effective national dialogue and consultation.”

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