Experts meet to discuss climate change in Ethiopia
Experts and stakeholders are meeting in the Ethiopian capital city, Addis Ababa, starting Monday, for a conference on Climate Change and Development in Africa, UN officials said.
The three-day conference is expected to provoke a debate on Africa’s development in a context of climate change, ahead of the next round of UN climate change negotiations in Warsaw, Poland, next month.
As the continent grapples with the daunting challenges of combating climate change, the Third Climate Change and Development in Africa (CCDA-III) conference presents an opportunity for stakeholders to explore various options for mainstreaming best policy practice, informed by empirical and scientific assessments, to
build strategies to respond to the impact of climate change.
It is argued that while the UN climate change negotiations have made some important progress, questions remain about the direction of that progress and whether it is significant enough to safeguard Africa‘s development interests.
The conference in Addis Ababa will attempt to explore whether the global climate change framework is working for the African continent, a topic which has been made as one of the sub-themes for the conference.
It will also attempt to draw conclusions on whether Africa still needs to engage in the global frameworks and whether alternative spaces exist for Africa-specific policy dialogue.
Governments under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have agreed to limit the global temperature rise to two degrees Celsius to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.
But organisers of the conference noted that during 2013, atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions exceeded 400 parts per million, the highest level in millennia and that scientists reckon that with the current trajectory of Greenhouse Gases emissions, the world is on course to a 6 degrees centigrade warming.
“With these projections, if no major global efforts to keep warming below 2 degrees centigrade are in place by 2020, the consequences for Africa will be dire. What options does the continent have to ensure its survival in these circumstances,” a paper released ahead of the conference said,.
The conference is being held under the auspices of Climate for Development in Africa (ClimDev-Africa), a joint programme of the African Union Commission (AUC), the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the African Development Bank (AfDB) on the theme, “is Africa on the rise: can the opportunities from climate change spring the continent to transformative development?”
Climate change represents a fundamental challenge to the sustainability of Africa‘s growth momentum and, according to conference organisers, it is imperative that African countries invest in mechanisms that would mainstream climate change into their development strategies to stave off its possible negative impacts.
They say commensurate efforts must also be made to identify and exploit the opportunities that climate change presents, but that to achieve this, there must be a concerted effort by all key players.
Addressing journalists on Sunday in Addis Ababa, ahead of the conference, Fatima Denton, Co-ordinator of the African Climate Policy Centre of the UNECA, challenged journalists in Africa to articulate and simplify scientific research materials for their audiences in a manner that will make the public understand the issues and relate to them.
