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Jeffrey Gogo Climate Story
In 2016 the Civil Protection Unit (CPU) started campaigns to educate and prepare rural communities in flood-prone areas on the most effective ways of responding to one, as a cyclone called Dineo devastated thousands of homes, livelihoods and livestock with too much rain a few weeks after that.

But the CPU couldn’t stop the deluge from rendering 30 families from Budiriro, a low income township in western Harare, homeless. The families built their houses on the edges of a stream running through the township. When rain hit hard during the second week of January 2017, bursting the stream’s banks, the homes weren’t spared.

Now, the events in Budiriro raise serious questions over Harare’s system of urban planning, particularly the municipality’s role in fuelling the erosion of underground water, and that of soil, by allowing housing development to take place on wetlands.

Broader concerns centre on Zimbabwe’s readiness and capability to handle climate-linked disaster events that exacerbate land degradation and the washing away of soil aided by poor developmental decisions.

Budiriro is just one in a litany of instances where hard-pressed Hararians have been clandestinely allowed to build homes in areas unsuitable for housing development, such as on wetlands. The impact may not show immediately, but the devastation in Budiriro and elsewhere should be a lesson for citizens and city authorities.

When Environment Minister Oppah Muchinguri-Kashiri spoke during the World Wetlands Day commemorations at Chirumanzu a week ago she expressed her desire for the better protection of wetlands, areas of saturated water key to maintaining the ecological balance.

“In order to reverse wetland degradation there is need for everyone to participate in the conservation and wise use of wetlands. Through stakeholder and community participation, there is need to strike a balance between human needs while sustaining biodiversity and other wetland services,” she said.

Land mafia spur chaos
The theme for the 2018 World Wetlands Day, celebrated every February 2, is particularly ominous: “Wetlands for a sustainable urban future”. This is so because wetlands in Zimbabwe have come under serious attack from agriculture and urban development.

Only a fifth of the 793 000 hectares under wetlands across Zimbabwe remain in pretty good condition, according to the Ministry of Environment. Another fifth is badly degraded and the remainder are hanging just in there, it says.

Minister Muchinguri-Kashiri will need to look at many cities across Zimbabwe that have suffered floods in recent years. In Harare, problems appear to result from wrong developments on wetlands, river banks and the wicked relation between the land mafia and politicians.

Residents and businesses are building gingerly on Harare’s flood plains, ignoring advice from environmentalists. But as we have already seen, the cost of ignorance can be pretty high, destroying lives and livelihoods.

Environmental Impact Assessments are often times ignored in order to facilitate the movement of capital in the housing sector by the land mafia, while it is public knowledge the City of Harare has failed to be effective monitors because of corruption.

The floods in Budiriro during 2017 rain season show that these problems can surface in other cities, indeed they are. Altogether, the financial and asset losses, and environmental losses from poor urban development and planning run into millions of dollars.

Traditionally, the homes around Harare were built with proper planning, avoiding flood plains. With wetlands free of housing development, excess water from run-off during seasons of unprecedented rain, induced by climate change, would rarely find its way into people’s homes as it does today.

Instead, the water was allowed to flow into fields, and into “spongy” wetlands, and into the small rivers surrounding Harare, eventually ending up in Lake Chivero.

Today, unplanned developments on wetlands or swamps have reduced the capacity for those areas to hold water. That, coupled with poor drainage and water from run-offs, have been some of the biggest causes of flooding in Harare. Mrs Muchinguri-Kashiri is now planning to destroy all real estate built on wetlands, for their protection, she told ZBC TV last week. It will be a drastic move were that to happen. But those families that can be moved should move.

When healthy, wetlands — those damp, soggy areas — are among the planet’s most diverse and varied habitats supporting a wide spectrum of plant and animal species, more so than most other habitats.

“Wetland habitats serve essential functions in an ecosystem, including acting as water filters, providing flood and erosion control, and furnishing food and homes for fish and wildlife,” says Dr Leonard Unganai, a climate expert with Oxfam Zimbabwe.

New erosion
Flooding is a major cause of land damage, washing away fine topsoil into rivers, lakes and dams at a scale, well, consistent with too much rain.

Yet, the urban erosion problem is a complex cycle of events that feed from each other into a perfect chaos — poor urban planning, wetlands decimation, siltation, water shortage, high flood risk and asset losses. Across Africa, the silting of rivers from soil erosion has contributed big time to the drying up of the same.

Isla Grundy, a biosciences expert with the University of Zimbabwe said that perceptions to erosion needed a radical complete change, including change in the tendency to limit erosion as referring to that of the soil alone.

“Erosion of traditional knowledge about environmental management is the one that bothers me most,” Grundy said, by email.

“In the past people saw themselves as part of the greater environment and were aware of the negative impacts they had on the natural ecosystem. Now, however, they are too far removed from their impacts, most don’t even know they have an impact.”

In trying to prevent disasters such like the one in Budiriro, climate scientists at the UZ in 2016 developed a satellite based technology that can be used to track flood events as they occur, helping communities and policy makers make informed decisions.

The flood tracker isn’t the silver bullet to the country’s long running woes with early warning and disaster readiness — and certainly not to erosion — but does provide some hope that technology can now be deployed if not to prevent erosion, then at least monitor land degradation in real time for intervention purposes.

The satellite based system tracks water flow following a rainfall event using satellite, predicting with some precision the likelihood of a flood within a day or so.

Thus communities will know of impending floods a day or more before the flood actually occurs, boosting their preparedness. There is little doubt that there are various erosions, as the UZ’s Grundy suggested, all working hand in hand to achieve ultimate destruction.

For example, surely cultural erosion is linked to wetland destruction: it’s only from a deep caring for the land that communities will put in the extra work to ensure that their land is cared for in such a comprehensive way that there is no building on wetlands.

God is faithful.
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