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Jeffry Gogo Climate Story
Climate change experts will meet in Kariba on July 15 for a final review of Zimbabwe’s climate change strategy before possible endorsement and adoption, as the country seeks to deliver greater efficiency in climate response.Two years since the process of compiling the National Climate Change Response Strategy (NCCRS) began; the crucial document may now be eventually released at a later date this year, hoping to straighten the existing budgetary and planning discord on adaptive and mitigatory action.

Indications are that the Environment, Water and Climate Minister Saviour Kasukuwere is favourable to publishing the strategy together with an over-arching national policy on climate change.

But the minister did not mention this when interviewed by The Herald Business by telephone last Wednesday.

He stated that the ministry “was quite happy” with the draft strategy submitted by Professor Sarah Feresu’s Institute of Environmental Studies (IES), a unit of the University of Zimbabwe and the lead consulting partner in the formulation process.

Minister Kasukuwere confirmed, however, that after all the review processes, the NCCRS “will certainly be launched before the end of this year, but I cannot give a definite date.”

The simultaneous release of the strategy and the national policy on climate change will be the correct thing to do, said Mr Washington Zhakata, national climate change co-ordinator in the environment ministry.

“These (climate strategy and climate policy) are complimentary documents. Under normal conditions a policy should come first before being operationalised by a strategy,” he said by telephone last Thursday.

“The Kariba meeting is a validation meeting. The second draft strategy has been polished and we are now looking at stakeholders approving (whether) all the information they supplied, comments submitted and reviews done, were accurately captured.”

Kariba will be the third and final national multi-stakeholder consultative meeting on the second final draft climate strategy. The second consultative workshop was held in February and the first last year.

The strategy is a result of extensive countrywide consultative meetings, 22 of which were convened at provincial level between September and November 2013 alone.

Professor Feresu refused to shed more light on the Kariba workshop. She said that the climate strategy had since been presented to all heads of parastatals “but yet to be adopted by the multi-stakeholder committee.”

Growing interest

The NCCRS design and formulation process started in 2012 with funding from the UN’s Development Programme (UNDP).

This was part of a four-nation pilot project to develop a document “with implementable adaptation and mitigation strategies” that address current climate impacts.

Zambia has since completed its strategy while it is work in progress in Botswana and Swaziland.

Actions that minimise people’s and ecosystems’ vulnerability to climate change (adaptation) and those that limit carbon emissions growth (mitigation) are considered some of the most effective ways of tackling climate impacts.

The climate strategy soon began to attract active interest from several other developmental agencies keen to input and assist Zimbabwe coming up with an all round climate plan. Well, at least, almost.

COMESA, the regional trading bloc for African countries of the east and south, became a stakeholder and so did UN’s Children Fund (UNICEF) and the Global Water Partnership, which came in with additional financial and technical support.

The Global Water Partnership focused on issues related to water and climate change within the framework of the NCCRS while UNICEF concentrated on children, the youth and other vulnerable groups.

The UNICEF partnership is particularly striking. Children endure some of the worst impacts of climate change due to their limited coping capacity.

The socio-economic effects of climate impacts on children in Zimbabwe — including death, hunger, disease, displacement and loss of education — have been largely underestimated or even ignored until now.

In a previously unpublished interview with The Herald Business in April, UNICEF’s chief of social policy, Samson Muradzikwa, said the agency, in partnership with the IES, had undertaken a study on the impacts of climate change on Zimbabwean children and on other vulnerable groups.

That study has been completed, but yet to be published. Its results have been fed into the climate strategy, hoping to influence national policy on rendering increased protection to children from climate events.The UNICEF report will show serious gaps in climate change education in the national curriculum, as well as a lack of financial support and natural assets for children and young people to fall back on when disasters hit. The research gathered children’s views through questionnaires in schools nationwide, community discussions, workshops with children and youth, and policy dialogues. Baseline surveys and case studies in drought and flood-prone rural areas were also carried out, together with a review of existing policies.

The first draft of the NCCRS released in May 2013 examines the challenges, risks and impacts of climate change on natural systems, different economic sectors as well as on physical and social infrastructure.

It explores opportunities for adaptation and mitigation, and delves into aspects of climate change governance, policy and legislation in Zimbabwe among other issues such as climate education, awareness and technology transfer. A concrete action plan and implementation framework is now expected to emerge from Kariba to lead the country’s climate response.

In the absence of a policy or strategy on climate change, Zimbabwe has struggled to respond to the impacts of climate change in a co-ordinated, effective manner. Climate change is still largely regarded peripheral in national processes.

Public budgets do not account for the science at a time the country faces increasing risk from climate linked events such as floods, tropical storms or droughts.
Lessons from HIV and Aids

On how to finance the implementable strategies, the draft NCCRS has yet to address this critical area.

The climate strategy lays a strong basis for further creative policy interventions but not financial.

It is clear, however, to urgently tackle the climate change problem, there is greater need for funding and integrated policy making across the currently unrelated policy agendas of water pollution, waste management, deforestation and land degradation, the most pressing environmental ills in Zimbabwe today.

Some lessons can be learnt here from the HIV and Aids domestic funding model. A climate change levy (much as the one on Aids) will certainly inflict some small damage to incomes, but the long-term benefits of such temporary misery will be much greater.

Finance will be crucial to achieving the desired level of mitigatory or adaptive success at both community and national levels.

A legal statutory body to administer the climate levy could be established, much like the National AIDS Council (NAC), but with capacity to mobilise additional climate finance from the domestic private sector and external financiers. We already have the Civil Protection Unit (CPU) responding to every form of emergency, but not climate specific.

The CPU is severely incapacitated, as is widely known, due to a dependence on funding from Treasury.

It is possible to transform or reform the CPU into that statutory body responsible for handling climate responses, but then it should first be removed from the Transport Ministry and transferred to the Environment Ministry.

The Transport Ministry can create another ‘CPU’ responding to disasters unrelated to climate change.

The Climate Ministry can simply create its own version of NAC and have some of the functions from the Civil Protection Unit linked to climate transferred into its portfolio.

Efforts to enhance transparency of financial use in the new climate change ‘NAC’ can be reinforced by tighter monitoring, evaluation and compliance.

In the absence of reliable external funding, the country has reported far greater success on HIV and AIDS from internal funding than those countries receiving foreign support. The AIDS prevalence rate has declined to 15 percent in 2013 from 60 percent 15 years ago.  HIV and AIDS is no longer a death sentence as was commonly the case before 2000. Deaths have declined to 52 000 per year in 2013 from 156 000 per year in 2004, as more people went on anti-retroviral treatment.
That’s from a disease once considered an outright death sentence. But climate change is a much bigger threat to humankind than HIV and AIDS.

The science is a swifter and more efficient attacker that can kill hundreds of thousands of people in a single raid, as when floods hit.

If that doesn’t happen, it follows up to make life very unbearable in an agro-based economy like Zimbabwe’s.

Climate linked droughts may cause severe food shortages, loss of human life, livestock and wildlife as well as significant financial losses from damaged or lost private and public property.

There is need to understand the innovative techniques that mobilised investment into the HIV and AIDS crusade, particularly the roles played by Government and the private/NGO sector, from which the climate change sector can learn.

We have already seen momentum building within the civic society to engage strategically with international bodies to bridge the adaptation and mitigation funding gaps.

Although public budgets will also increase investment into these areas, they should be targeted and used in a transparent manner for effectiveness.

Public finance alone is currently struggling to satisfy Zimbabwe’s competing needs from health to education to agriculture to infrastructure development, among others.

Realistically, Zimbabwe is unlikely to secure long-term finance from developmental partners, even under the Green Climate Fund.

Financiers out there still consider Zimbabwe risky, even for developmental finance. The HIV and AIDS sector will testify.

The more likely foreign funding will be short-term and must therefore, when received, be immediately aligned with policy measures and deployed effectively to those programmes that need it most.

Professor Feresu said financing will be the only hindrance to the successful implementation of the NCCRS.

God is faithful.

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