Business Daily (Kenya): Kenya to pay heavily for failure to tackle climate change

Business Daily (Kenya): Kenya to pay heavily for failure to tackle climate change

Bottom of Form

Tuesday, August 25 2009 at 00:00

Kenya’s failure to take action on climate change will result in losses running to trillions of shillings ranging from reduced arable land to deaths from hunger, a top climate scholar has warned.

But this can be reversed if economic plans are revised to include climate change scenarios and how to lessen its effects.

“We are in the centre of the storm whichever way we look at it,” said Prof Richard Odingo, the vice chairman of the United Nations Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, responsible for guiding nations on how to lessen climate change effects.

Climate change will mean higher temperatures in countries like Kenya, to peak in 2050 at an additional two degrees centigrade and 7.5 degrees more by 2090 if no action is taken today, research shows.

Already, rising temperatures have resulted in melting of glacier at Mount Kenya, leading to unpredictable water levels downstream.

Glaciers elsewhere are also melting with the water adding to ocean levels. In Kenya, the rise of the Indian Ocean will result in the loss of land used to grow mangoes, cashew nuts and coconuts.

This will cost the country Sh35 billion annually in addition to loss of habitat and arable land.

“If we leave out climate change on our economic planning, then we can never again assume that all things are equal,” said Prof Odingo.

He spoke in Nairobi when climate change experts from the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) met to find out how the region can lessen effects of the phenomena.

Experts at the meeting said water and electricity rationing in Kenya were the clearest indicator that the country was already suffering from effects of climate change.

The experts warned of a “hell on earth” kind of scenario if the government and other IGAD members fail to take action like strict environmental conservation and afforestation.

In Kenya, the recommendation is to revisit Vision 2030 and incorporate it with climate change. Predictions show that Northern Kenya will experience even drier conditions as Sahara desert progresses into sub-Sahara Africa.

Common position
The call for Kenya to act came as leaders of 10 African countries met in Ethiopia on Monday to try to agree on a common position on climate change ahead of crucial UN talks in Denmark in December to decide how future investments in reducing global warming will be conducted.

The African Union said Africa will demand for compensation for damages caused by global warming and a common negotiation position for the continent.

Another global forum, aimed at guiding the world to lessen effects of climate change, also started in Nairobi with the message for an increase in growing of trees.

Trees are “carbon sinks”, they absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. In their photosynthesis cycle, trees absorb carbon dioxide at night and emit oxygen during the day.

Satellite images by scientists from the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) demonstrated that farmers across the world are growing trees on their farms while governments are not taking action to encourage them to grow even more.

“The area revealed (more than one billion hectares) shows that farmers are protecting and planting trees spontaneously,” said Mr Dennis Garrity, the ICRAF director general.

“The problem is that policy makers and planners have been slow to recognise this phenomenon and take advantage of the beneficial effect of planting trees on farms.” ICRAF is working with partners to encourage agroforestry to help lessen effects of climate change and provide farmers with food, windbreaks and erosion control, fuel for heating and timber for housing.

Back to Menu

_________________________________________________________________

Reuters: Illegal fishing evades U.N. crackdown: study

Tue Aug 25, 2009 3:58pm EDT

The Pew Environment Group, a Washington-based think-tank, has found that a United Nations scheme to oblige ports to crack down on illegal fishing boats is handicapped by a lack of accurate information, implementation and participation.

In the five years from 2004, of 176 vessels blacklisted by regional fishing authorities, only 55 turned up on port records, Pew said in a report it presented to the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome.

In some cases, ports were not checking ships' identity, using the unique vessel number on their hulls. In others, ships had found ways of avoiding detection, such as changing their names, sometimes doing so mid-voyage before entering a region where enforcement was stricter.

Blacklisted vessels are, in theory, banned from landing fish at ports in the regions signed up to the scheme.

"We need to expand from a regional approach to a global approach so all ports are acting against villains, otherwise they just move to another part of the world," said Stefano Flothmann, head of International Ocean Governance at Pew.

Pew estimates that a fifth of all fish landed come from illegal, unregulated or unreported vessels -- and this figure rises to around half for valuable species like blue fin tuna.

In some areas like West Africa and Southeast Asia, countries simply lack the resources to patrol their waters.

"For some countries, this represents a major loss of income ... and is having a direct impact on the development of these countries," Flothmann said.

"In Somalia, a country which is totally incapable of enforcing anything in its waters, coastal fisheries have been devastated, turning fishermen into recruits for pirate gangs."

Part of the problem that Asian countries which consume large quantities of fish -- such as China, South Korea and Taiwan -- are not too scrupulous about where the catch comes from, Flothmann said.

Europe, however, was also not exempt from criticism: much of the fishing fleet from countries like Spain and Norway use flags of convenience to dodge fishing quotas, he said.