NAIROBI, Kenya (PAMACC News) – AGRA has announced the opening of applications for the second cohort for the Centre for African Leaders in Agriculture (CALA)’s Advanced Leadership Programme. Designed for rising stars and established executives from across Africa’s agriculture sector in government, the private sector, and civil society, the programme is the continent’s premier leadership programme tailored for developing leaders to advance sustainable agriculture sector priorities. The programme’s application window, which is open from April 19 to June 3 2022, will result in the selection of 80 top applicants from eight focus countries – Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. “In these times of crisis, leadership has never been more important in mitigating crisis, and strengthening resilience. CALA will help leaders develop the skills they need to take the continent through tough times and work for prosperous food systems,” said AGRA President, Dr. Agnes Kalibata. The Centre’s highly competitive Advanced Leadership Programme is a 16-month learning journey that emphasizes collaborative and practical experience focused on supporting leaders to advance their professional skills and contribute to flagship programs to achieve progress toward agriculture transformation. CALA is an AGRA-led initiative and is delivered in collaboration with implementing partners including the African Management Institute (AMI), CALA’s lead implementation and learning partner, and USAID’s Policy LINK. Policy LINK has led the design and rollout of the leadership programme’s coaching component “At AMI we believe leadership is fundamental to the success of any organisation, whether it’s a business, civil society organization, or government,” said Rebecca Harrison, CEO and Co-founder of AMI. “We know that to drive transformation, leaders must be highly-skilled in cross-sector collaboration, be able to lead high-functioning teams, and be positioned to adjust to change and future challenges. We’ve tailored CALA’s learning approach to meet the unique needs of Africa’s ambitious leaders in agriculture and put them in a position to practically apply what they are learning, to take advantage of their limited time. The results we’re already seeing in the CALA Advanced Leadership Programme are heartening and we’re excited to bring on the next cohort.” During the programme, cohort members participate in virtual learning sessions with sector peers and benefit from CALA’s unique approach to on-the-job and executive and group coaching, which emphasizes local knowledge and individual learning styles. “We are fortunate to call upon the talents of an accomplished cadre representing Africa's professional coaching community,” said Steve Smith, Chief of Party of the USAID Policy LINK program, which is leading the CALA coaching program. “Through them, our executive and team coaching utilizes a variety of leadership tools and methodologies geared toward enabling each leader to reflect, learn, and grow.” Among the programme’s offerings are four Leadership Forums with experts from across the continent and globe. Participants will also have access to CALA’s comprehensive library of online leadership courses and derive lessons and best practices from case studies of ‘Game-changers’ spurring Agricultural transformation in Africa and the global south. By the end of the programme, within CALA’s unique Action…

Climate change made extreme rainfall heavier and more likely to happen during several back-to-back storms earlier this year in Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique, according to rapid attribution analysis by an international team of leading climate scientists. While the analysis shows that climate change made the eventsworse, the scientists were not able to quantify exactly how much climate change influenced the event due to a shortage of high quality weather observations available for this part of Africa. In early 2022, Southeast Africa was hit by three tropical cyclones and two tropical storms in just six weeks. Tropical Storm Ana, in late January, was followed by Tropical Cyclone Batsirai, which made landfall in Madagascar on 5 February. Over the next few weeks, the region was hit by Tropical Storm Dumako and Tropical Cyclones Emnati and Gombe. The consecutive storms left people with little time to react. Madagascar, Malawi and Mozambique were the worst-hit countries, with more than a million people affected by extreme rainfall and floods, and 230 reported deaths. To evaluate the role of climate change on the frequency and intensity of extreme rainfall during the storms, the scientists analysed weather observations and computer simulations to compare the climate as it is today, after about 1.2°C of global warming since the late 1800s, with the climate of the past, following peer-reviewed methods. The analysis focused on rainfall, which caused widespread flooding, over the wettest three-day periods in two regions: Madagascar, where cyclone Batsirai caused major damage, and an area over Malawi and Mozambique most affected by Tropical Storm Ana. In both cases, the results show that rainfall associated with the storms was made more intense by climate change and that episodes of extreme rainfall such as these have become more frequent. The finding is consistent with scientific understanding of how climate change, caused by human greenhouse gas emissions, influences heavy rainfall. As the atmosphere becomes warmer it accumulates more water, increasing the risk of downpours. With further greenhouse gas emissions and continued temperature increases such heavy rainfall episodes will become even more common. While the analysis shows that climate change made the events more intense and damaging, the precise contribution of climate change to the event could not be quantified, due to the absence of comprehensive historical records of rainfall in the region. Of 23 weather stations in the affected area in Mozambique, only four had relatively complete records going back to 1981. In Madagascar and Malawi there were no weather stations with suitable data for the study. In many other parts of the world where more comprehensive weather station data is available, scientists have been able to quantify the influence of climate change on particular extreme events. Increased investment in weather stations in Africa would enable a more precise estimate of the impact of rising greenhouse gas concentrations on the continent. The study was conducted by 22 researchers as part of the World Weather Attribution group, including scientists from universities and meteorological agencies in France, Madagascar, Mozambique, the Netherlands, New…

NAIROBI, Kenya (PAMACC News) - A new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released on April 4, 2022 shows that accelerated international cooperation on finance to support low income countries is a critical enabler of a low-carbon and just transition. The report, Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change points out that scaled-up public grants for adaptation and mitigation and funding for low-income and vulnerable regions, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa, may have the highest returns. According to Celine Guivarch, one of the lead authors, the report shows that reducing emissions at the speed and scale required to limit warming to two degrees or below implies deep economic changes that could increase inequality between and within countries. “But policies can be designed to avoid increasing or even decrease economic inequality and poverty. This entails broadening access to clean technologies and international finance. In applying just transition principles to integrate considerations of equity and justice into policies at all scales and enable accelerated mitigation action.” Key options according to the report include: Increased public finance flows from developed to developing countries beyond USD100 billion-a-year; shifting from a direct lending modality towards public guarantees to reduce risks and greatly leverage private flows at lower cost; local capital markets development; and, changing the enabling operational definitions. According to Brett Cohen, one of the coordinating lead authors, the report recognizes that mitigation must be region and context specific. So not all actions are applicable everywhere. Furthermore, it highlights the multiple sustainable development benefits from mitigation, as well as the trade-offs that need to be considered. Understanding and accounting for these will help to build the support base for mitigation action. He further noted that the report considers mitigation from a system point of view so as to maximise various interactions to optimize benefits. For instance, if we are to change to clean cooking at household level, it is best if this is achieved through renewable energy. Further, mitigation efforts need to look at how various sectors and agendas such as the sustainable development goals complement each other On the role of Africa in mitigation, Cohen believes that it is more important to ensure low emissions development trajectories, to ensure that development leapfrogs the high emissions historically found in developed countries. The report explores the concept of sustainable development pathways, demonstrating that all decisions taken along the development trajectory have implications for the emissions intensity for economies. The authors also found that agriculture, forestry, and other land use can provide large-scale emissions reductions and also remove and store carbon dioxide at scale. “Agriculture, forestry, and other land use contribute 22% of global emissions,” said Mercedes Bustamante the lead author: Forest conservation, nature-based solutions, options for developing countries. This sector, according to Bustamante, can not only provide large-scale reductions of emissions but can also remove and store CO2 at scale. She observed that the knowledge and experience of Indigenous Peoples and local communities are crucial for land-based mitigation. That mainstreaming these insights relies on…

PAMACC News - A new report from West Coast Environmental Law, Net Zero or Net Reckless, warns that technofixes that aim to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere should play only a limited role in Canada’s future climate plans. The report pushes back against politicians and oil and gas industry leaders who have advocated for large-scale development of industrial “negative emissions technologies” instead of immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. West Coast is concerned that Canada’s Emissions Reduction Plan, released yesterday, proposes for the first time using negative emissions technologies to achieve its 2030 target but fails to clarify how and to what extent these technologies will be used. “Our review of the scientific literature is clear: the world needs reductions in fossil fuel pollution combined with a realistic - and very limited - use of negative emissions technologies.” said West Coast’s Climate Accountability Strategist, Fiona Koza. “The world needs these technologies to help restore the atmosphere and to capture the emissions from a small number of essential but extremely difficult to decarbonize processes, not as an excuse to delay emissions reductions or to continue oil and gas production and use.” Direct Air Capture and Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage are two technologies used to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Both have only ever been implemented at a very small scale and have massive resource or land demands that severely limit their use. They are cousins to the better-known Carbon Capture and Storage (CSS), which reduces greenhouse gas emissions from industrial sources, rather than removing them from the atmosphere, and which raises some of the same problems. Canada’s new Emissions Reductions Plan predicts that by 2030, Direct Air Capture in Canada will suck approximately seven hundred thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere each year, but it says nothing about its role in the climate plan, who will pay for it, or the massive energy, land and water impacts, and potential impacts on Indigenous Peoples that it brings. The Net Zero or Net Reckless report finds that, depending on the technology used, how it is powered, and what is done with the captured carbon dioxide, even that modest amount of Direct Air Capture could require tens of millions of Gigajoules of energy and millions of tonnes of water, and could even increase greenhouse gas emissions. “Done right, a small amount of negative emissions technologies can be part of the solution,” said Koza. “But done badly they are a subsidy to the fossil fuel industry that can make climate change worse.” West Coast Environmental Law will be monitoring implementation of Canada’s new Emissions Reduction Plan to see if technological solutions are limited to the role that science demands.