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	Climate change is already impacting livelihoods by AllAfrica / Realising Rights Africa   Facing Extreme Weather Head On, by Cindy Shiner. (AllAfrica.com)   Although Africa has contributed little to global warming, the continent and other parts of the developing world are bearing the brunt of the resultant climate change, according to scientists and development specialists. The question now is what to do about it before the fallout has disastrous consequences.   The snow atop Mt. Kilimanjaro is receding. Lake Chad is evaporating. Increased flooding, drought, water shortages, rising sea levels and food insecurity are only some of the consequences of climate change across Africa. Already these shifts are having an impact on livelihoods.   "We see frequent crop failures due to droughts and untimely rain leading to crop failures. We also see livestock fatalities, resulting in people losing lots of cattle," Professor Pius Yanda, director of the Institute of Resource Assessment at the University of Dar es Salaam, recently told a panel on climate change and climate justice in the Tanzanian city. "We see flooding destroying infrastructure, settlements, leaving crops in the field. These are vivid examples of impacts which are taking place already."   Heightened competition for dwindling resources, such as water and arable land, increases chances for conflict, which has its own consequences: violence, deaths, displacement, disease and violations of human rights.   Former Irish president Mary Robinson told the audience at the panel, which was a centerpiece of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation Forum on climate change, food security and regional economic integration last November, that climate change is a human rights issue.   "The phenomenon of climate change will undermine progress on almost all of the human rights guaranteed in the universal declaration of human rights and other international human rights instruments - and also undermine achievements, particularly for the poorest countries, of the "Millennium Development Goals" to reduce poverty and boost development, said Robinson, former United Nations high commissioner on human rights.   She said climate change was a classic human rights struggle about power: those with the greatest power - mainly developed nations - produced most of the greenhouse gases that have contributed to global warming, while those in developing countries, with the least power, were most at risk from the consequences.   Katherine Sierra, vice president for sustainable development at the World Bank, said, for example, that if all the SUV"s in the United States were replaced with European standard emission cars, that would largely account for the emissions that would give 1.6 billion people – the world"s poorest - minimum access to energy. "You could afford to provide 1.6 billion people worth of basic energy to those people who don"t have any emissions today, so it"s a basic fairness," she said.   Regardless of who is more responsible for global warming, the panelists emphasized that the time to act was now. Yanda said the way forward is to integrate climate change in the development agenda because it is a crosscutting issue like poverty and Aids. Like the presenters on food security and economic integration, the climate panelists spoke in the context of cell-phone entrepreneur Mo Ibrahim"s conviction that good governance is essential to solving such pressing problems.   U.S. Representative Donald Payne (Democrat - New Jersey), agreed. Payne, chair of the House Subcommittee on Africa and Global Health, quoted former UN secretary general Kofi Annan as saying industrialized nations must live up to the "historic responsibility" for the accumulation of greenhouse gases.   "But on the other hand, if all of the things were mitigated and unless there are changes in many countries in a manner in which governments deal with agriculture and its people and governance in general, the problem will not be solved," he said. "So it"s a two-way street. We need to do what we must do there, but by the same token, leadership in Africa has to stand up and do a much better job than what it"s done to date."   African environmentalists point to the fact that the continent provided a unified position during recent climate talks in Copenhagen as a step forward in dealing with the challenges of global warming.   In fact, in the face of the potential for disastrous consequences of climate change, some stakeholders see opportunity, although it is not one that Africans can easily achieve without external assistance and private sector support.   "Whilst it"s true you are not a large emitter [of greenhouse gases], there are opportunities to get access to some of the new technologies," said Sierra, of the World Bank. "Whether it"s geo-thermal, whether it"s wind, whether it"s off-grid solar and the like, you can modernize your energy systems while you"re growing."   Scientists who have been warning about the climate-fueled perils to come are struggling to find reasons to be optimistic. African officials, business leaders and civil society representatives who attended the Mo Ibrahim event acknowledged the daunting challenges of coping with the earth"s overall warming. But they found ideas to explore, options to pursue and reasons to hope that Africans can be a part of the global solution - if, that is, the world community can find the political will and the financial resources to partner with the least culpable but most affected region. Visit the related web page
	New study reveals rapid biodiversity loss despite pledge to curb the decline by UN Environment Programme & agencies   April 2010   Global biodiversity has been declining alarmingly despite a pledge by world leaders in 2002 to help curb the loss of earthly life forms, a new United Nations-supported study shows.   “Our analysis shows that Governments have failed to deliver on the commitments they made in 2002: biodiversity is still being lost as fast as ever, and we have made little headway in reducing the pressures on species, habitats and ecosystems,” said Stuart Butchart of the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre, and the paper"s lead author. The study is published in the latest edition of the journal Science.   In more than 30 indicators – measures of different aspects of biodiversity, including changes in species’ populations and risk of extinction, habitat extent and community composition – the study found no evidence of a significant reduction in the rate of decline of biodiversity.   The pressures facing biodiversity continue to increase, the study reveals, and concludes that the 2010 target for reducing the loss of biodiversity has not been achieved. The findings represent the first assessment of how the targets made through the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) in 2002 have been missed.   “Since 1970, we have reduced animal populations by 30 per cent, the area of mangroves and sea grasses by 20 percent and the coverage of living corals by 40 per cent,” said UNEP’s Chief Scientist, Joseph Alcamo. “These losses are clearly unsustainable, since biodiversity makes a key contribution to human well-being and sustainable development, as recognized by the UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs),” he said.   Feb 2010   Saving the world’s myriad diverse species, which are being lost to human activity at an unprecedented rate that some experts put at 1,000 times the natural progression, is vital not just for environmental reasons but for the economic well-being of humankind, a senior United Nations official said today.   “Without preserving biodiversity and preserving our natural habitat, the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) just cannot be achieved,” says the UN Development Programme (UNDP) Environment Director Veerle Vandeweerd, referring to targets set by the 2000 UN summit to slash a host of social ills, from extreme poverty and hunger to maternal and infant mortality to lack of access to education and health care, all by 2015.   She cited former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland, who in 1993 said that the library of life is on fire. “And 17 years later the library of life, which is our biodiversity, is still on fire,” Ms. Vandeweerd said.   The reason why UNDP is “so involved in biodiversity and why we think it is so important is indeed because biodiversity is not about greenness, biodiversity is about the economy, and biodiversity is about the life of people at the community level.   “The loss of biodiversity and the degradation of natural resources impact first and foremost the poor and the women and the vulnerable and we should not forget that three quarters of the world’s population depend on natural resources for their daily living and their daily survival, from the food, the shelter, the recreation, everything; three quarters of the world population is directly related to biodiversity on this planet.”   The UN has stressed that the variety of life on Earth is vital to sustaining the living networks and systems that provide health, wealth, food and fuel.   “Humans are part of nature"s rich diversity and have the power to protect or destroy it,” the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) says.   The Convention, which opened for signature at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, entered into force at the end of 1993 and now has 193 Parties, is based on the premise that the world’s diverse ecosystems purify the air and the water that are the basis of life, stabilize and moderate the Earth"s climate, renew soil fertility and pollinate plants.   Yet human activity is causing this diversity to be lost are irreversibly at a greatly accelerated rate. As an example, Ms. Vandeweerd cited marine species. “In fact, the last frontier of the world lies in the ocean and it’s sad to see that we are destroying our oceans so quickly before we even know which biodiversity is harboured in the ocean,” she said.   “The deep sea biodiversity is something that we are just coming to know, is already being destroyed by all kinds of fishing. We are still discovering new species in the deep sea every single day and before we even discover them we are killing them.” Visit the related web page
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