BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe (PAMACC News) – Climate change is now a threat to major international trade routes, including ports, straits and roads and could disrupt global food supplies and increase food prices, according to a recent study.
The study points out that just under 25 percent of all food eaten in the world including staple crops are traded on international markets.
About 54 of the global trade in soybeans, cereals and fertilizers passes through at least one maritime chokepoint, according to a report, Chokepoints and vulnerabilities in Global Food Trade, released on 27th June by Chatham House, a British think-tank.
The report identifies fourteen chokepoints critical to global food security, eight of which are maritime including the Panama Canal, Suez Canal, and the Turkish Straits. Three inland chokepoints include the US inland waterways and Brazil’s road network; and three coastal chokepoints include the Black Sea ports and US Gulf Coast ports on which all traded goods pass through.
Trade and chokepoints are vulnerable to the risk of weather and climate, political and institutional; and conflict and security, making it critical for governments to invest in "climate-resilient" infrastructure as well as taking other precautionary measures such as diversifying food production and stocks.
Responses taken by governments to alleviate the risks often have short term, national interests which can exacerbate the global problem and undermine systemic resilience, the report notes.
“Meanwhile, climate change is going to make things worse by increasing the frequency of extreme weather events, fuelling conflict, and damaging already-weakened infrastructure,” Laura Wellesley, one of the study's authors said in a statement. “We need a new, collaborative approach to mapping and mitigating the growing threat we all face.”
Global food security depends upon trade in four staple crops – maize, wheat, rice and soybean production of which is concentrated in a handful of exporting ‘breadbasket’ regions. For example, the US exports 30% of the world’s maize supply, and 29% of its soy; while Brazil is the largest exporter of soy globally (32%) and accounts for 48% of China’s soy imports. In total, nearly 25% of all food for direct human consumption is traded on international markets and this is increasing.
The global cereals trade - which is what the report focuses on - was worth $132bn in 2015. According to the report, climate change is likely to aggravate socioeconomic and political risks.
Extreme weather events and more frequent harvest failures are expected to increase human displacement, indirectly amplifying the risks of inter-group violent conflict and civil war by exacerbating conflict drivers such as poverty, economic shocks and localized resource scarcity.
As coastlines and maritime borders are redrawn by rising sea levels, the risk of territorial disputes may increase, the study found, noting that climate-induced food supply shortages may prompt the more regular imposition of unilateral trade measures. One preliminary analysis found that a global agricultural production shock that would have been defined as a one-in-100-year event in 1951–2010 could become a one-in-30-year occurrence by 2040, increasing the risk of export bans and food price crises.
“The risks are growing as we all trade more with each other and as climate change takes hold,” Wellesley said. “The oil industry has been mapping this sort of risk for years but it has been woefully overlooked in discussions of food security.”
Past events such as floods in Brazil and the Southern United States and the export ban on wheat from the Black Sea countries that contributed in part to the Arab Spring, point to the sort of disruptions that can occur when chokepoints are closed, said Wellesley.
African countries, which are also major food importers are impacted by the risk on major trade routes. The African continent annually spends more than $50 billion in food imports. For example, the report says over a third of grain imports for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) – the most food-import dependent region in the world – pass through at least one maritime chokepoint for which there is no alternative route.
Historical links between food insecurity and political/social instability make the region’s extreme exposure to chokepoint risk a particular cause for concern.
Low-income net-food importers in sub-Saharan Africa, including Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya, Tanzania and Sudan are also exposed.
The report recommended that governments urgently strengthen global rules and cooperation – by limiting export controls, and sharing information; and invest in climate resistant infrastructure.
YAOUNDÉ, Cameroon (PAMACC News) - Lives of over 5.6 million children are increasingly threatened by extreme weather in countries around Lake Chad including, Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria, UNICEF has warned.
Heavy rains leading to floods in most of these regions is not only slowing down development assistance to a region already crippled economically by high insecurity but has left the poverty-mired population especially women and children even more vulnerable to water borne diseases, a UNICEF report has noted.
Cameroon government officials say the rains are already severe in the Northern region of the country, and it is now a problem for the local population, and a concern to development partners and the government.
“Floods have been a major challenge in the Northern region of Cameroon stoking climate worries. The government is on the alert,” says Cameroon’s minister of environment, nature protection and sustainable development Hele Pierre.
According to health and environment experts, epidemics have continued to worsen in the past years as a result of heavy rains, which sweep impurities into open drinking water wells, thus, exposing mostly children and women to multiple health risk.
According to the June 26, 2917 UNICEF report, more than 5.6 million children are at increased risk of contracting waterborne diseases, such as cholera and diarrheal infections, as the rainy season takes its toll in the countries around Lake Chad already devastated economically by conflicts and insecurity by Boko Haram terrorists.
The report says “the threat of disease outbreaks in Cameroon, Chad, Niger and Nigeria coincides with growing regional insecurity and increased population movements particularly in Nigeria's northeast.”
"The rains will further complicate what is already a dire humanitarian situation, as millions of children made vulnerable by conflict are now facing the potential spread of diseases," said Marie Pierre Poirier, UNICEF Regional Director for West and Central Africa. "
Unsafe water, inadequate sanitation and poor hygiene conditions leads to cholera outbreaks and to Hepatitis E, a deadly disease for pregnant women and their babies, while standing water pools can attract malaria-carrying mosquitos the UNICEF report says.
The heavy rains which triggers flooding and muddy roads constitutes a major impediment to development assistance, severely limiting humanitarian access to remote areas and villages amidst rising needs of millions of children and families left homeless and hungry in refugee camps in Northern Cameroon and Nigeria.
Across the Lake Chad region, UNICEF and other development partners are working in communities at higher risk of cholera outbreaks to teach families about the effects of the disease and practical steps to help avoid infection. In Niger, Cameroon and Chad, essential drugs and bars of soap have been prepositioned in warehouses close to IDP camps to curb cholera outbreak.
According to UNICEF Water, Sanitation and Hygiene, response in the Lake Chad Basin has received less than 20 percent of the US$80 million required to meet urgent needs in 2017.
BULAWAYO, Zimbabwe (PAMACC News) – Getting political and policy buy-in on the Sustainable Development Goals is not an exception but critical in achieving the ambitious agenda to end global poverty in 15 years, a leading science think tank says.
SDGs, adopted by global governments in 2015 and considered the best chance at delivering development, can be successfully implemented if they are integrated says the International Council for Science (ICSU), a non-governmental organisation representing 122 national scientific bodies across 142 countries.
The ICSU in May 2017 launched a blue print report titled ‘A Guide to SDG interactions: from Science to Implementation,’ to help countries implement and achieve the 17 goals and supportive 169 targets. The report, a collaboration of 22 scientists - examines the interactions between the SDGs and applies a quantitative scale to determine the extent to which they reinforce or conflict with each other.
“It is a big, unwieldy, ambitious agenda that – if it is successfully implemented – could set the world on a course toward inclusive, sustainable development,” Anne-Sophie Stevance, report Lead Coordinator and Science Officer at the International Council for Science, said in an online interview.
Stevance says in the SDGs are all the pieces needed to address sustainability challenges in a single bag but assembling them into a coherent picture key to desired development outcomes for people and the planet, requires understanding on how the individual pieces fit together.
“Connecting the dots will require science and information gathering, political leadership, cross-sectoral coordination and multi-stakeholder dialogues, realigning funding and ways of working to match the ambition of the agenda and realise its transformative potential,” said Stevance.
The ICS developed the guide to facilitate the integration of the SDGs which Stevance said are a comprehensive set of aspirational goals for people and the planet as they integrate the three dimensions of sustainable development in the 17 goals and 169 targets that were agreed.
While the goals fundamentally reframed development by recognizing the interdependency between economic prosperity, fair and equitable development for all, environmental protection and stewardship, the number of goals and targets bore and the risks of countries and stakeholders cherry picking among the goals.
The UN has called for the SDGs to be considered as integrated and indivisible agenda but no one fully understands what this entails, Stevance noted.
“The scientific community has argued throughout the SDG process for the definition of the goals to take a systems-approach that takes fully into account the growing body of scientific evidence on how fundamentally connected natural and social systems are at multiple scales, said Stevance, adding that a systematic and science-based mapping of interactions goal by goal that applied a common language and approach to characterizing the nature and strength of the interactions was missing.
Frédérique Seyler, Deputy Director of the department on Internal Dynamics and Continent surface at the Institute of Research for Development in France, says science has played a major role in the lead up to the definition of the SDGs, and now it can influence their implementation and monitoring.
The report, says Seyler, highlights to the role of scientists in harvesting and synthesizing scientific knowledge on each of the SDGs and their interactions, a key role that require cross-disciplinary collaboration and a strong interest for working with policy-makers and stakeholders.
“The goals are the expression of a political agenda,” said Seyler, pointing out that it is one task of science organizations among others to make the goals realistic and feasible; in particular in deepening the investigations concerning the social and economic costs and benefits of their implementation and working on the indicators that are essentials to evaluate the progress made in their implementation.
The SDGs, cover a diverse range of issues including gender equity, sustainable cities, access to clean water, and good governance. The aim is for all countries to achieve the goals and their targets by 2030 and set the world on a path towards sustainable development
“This report demonstrates the unique role that science can and must play in the implementation of the SDGs,” ICSU Executive Director Heide Hackmann, said in a statement at the launch of the report in New York.
“We combined the rigor of scientific thinking with the in-depth expertise of scientists from diverse fields like agronomy, oceanography, and epidemiology. The result was an independent analysis that can help policymakers and others engage with the goals and define their own priorities.”
DURBAN, South Africa (PAMACC News) - African experts in indigenous knowledge have begun steps that will culminate in the establishment of a Pan-African Indigenous Knowledge Systems-Informed Climate Information Service (IKS-CIS) platform.
The experts have also developed Natural Resource Management and Sustainable Livelihood and Communications strategies that will work hand in hand with the IKS-CIS platform.
The experts have also resolved to develop an IKS-CIS curriculum and spearhead teaching of IKS-CIS in African universities and other institutions to promote indigenous knowledge in promoting climate information.
The experts developed the above after a two-day workshop in Durban, South Africa last week.
Prof Hassan Kaya, Director of the Department of Science and Technology-National Research Foundation (DST-NRF) Centre in Indigenous Knowledge Systems (CIKS), University of KwaZulu-Natal (UKZN), South Africa emphasized the importance of African IKS-CIS.
“Conventional weather services need to be more relevant and accessible to African local communities. We need to harness indigenous knowledge weather forecasting practices that are inbuilt in African indigenous cultures, established after long years of observation of their respective natural environments,” Kaya, who is also the chair and convener of the Durban workshop, said.
He noted it is mostly the only knowledge accessible, affordable and actionable source of weather and climate information for sustainable community livelihood.
“Most African local communities tend to perceive conventional weather information as unreliable and untimely. African local communities in their diverse ecosystems and cultures make use of biotic indicators to predict future weather conditions. However, research also reveals increasing pessimism about the viability of indigenous weather forecasting mechanisms,” Kaya said.
Prof Joseph Matowanyika, of the Zimbabwe-based Chinhoyi University of Technology, Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Environment and Lifelong Learning Department, attributed the above scenarios to a number of factors.
“This is due to the extinction of some biotic species that were used for weather forecasting and expansion of modern education and monotheistic religions which undermines the claimed rationality of indigenous knowledge,” Matowanyika said.
He added, “It is also due to the precarious survival of indigenous weather forecasting skills is further undermined by poverty and lack of clear knowledge transfer mechanisms and poor documentation of indigenous knowledge-related climate information.
Kaya observed that the limitations of both (indigenous and conventional) weather information service systems require research on the status of indigenous weather forecasting practices among different African ecosystems and cultures and ecosystems.
“This should be done before they vanish beyond recovery; and integrating the experience of modern science and indigenous knowledge for more rigorous weather forecasting. It is this consideration which led to the initiative of developing a Pan-Africa IKS-CIS platform,” Kaya said.
The platform will serve as a coordinating tool for interfacing conventional/existing weather information services and indigenous knowledge systems-based climate change information services. This will make conventional weather information services more culturally and ecologically relevant and accessible.
“The platform will assist in building an interactive multi-media database informed by the nature and processes of production, sharing, storage and application of IKS-informed climate information which are culturally and linguistically specific,” Matowanyika said.
“The holistic and multidisciplinary nature of IKS provides the platform with the opportunity to engage diverse stakeholders from across disciplines, cultures and ecological zones for the sustainability of the platform,” Kaya said.
He added that the complementarity of knowledge systems makes the platform a unique tool for climate change research, innovation, policy development and human capital development.
“The interactive multi-media database will have the capacity to synthesize modern climatic information systems informed by community-based knowledge systems that will be applicable across biomes and regions,” Matowanyika said.
He added, “The identified gaps and strengths of the two climate information systems will be accommodated by the complementarity of the knowledge systems to mitigate climate change and variability.”
The experts pointed out that the platform will help Africa better understand climate change and policy taking and making.
“This platform is in line with the broader objectives of the Weather and Climate Information Services for Africa (WISER) Pan-Africa component which includes the strengthening of climate information governance and providing an enabling environment for climate information services uptake and use in Africa,” Kaya said.
Dr Mayashree Chinsamym a research manager at DST-NRF, CIKS noted the platform will provide an understanding of the importance of IKS in explaining the symbiotic relationship between ecosystems and human dynamics for climate change adaptation and mitigation.
“This includes the correlation between habitat, ecosystem services, culture including language, natural resources and their collective impact on community livelihood in terms of food security and nutrition and energy needs in the face of climate change and variability,” Chinsamym said.
Dr Yvette Smith and Dr David Smith of the DST-NRF, CIKS, noted the platform will facilitate research and documentation of African cultural and ecological histories, including indicators of natural early warning systems and innovative adaptation strategies to climate variability and change.
“It will also provide a clear and broad conceptualization of climate change and variability in the African context across time. This will provide foundation for devising policy strategies which are culturally and ecologically specific,” Yvette said.
She added that the platform will also identify IKS-based commonalities in ecologically and culturally comparable zones for climate change policy development and implementation.
David said the holistic and multidisciplinary nature of an IKS and climate change platform gives stakeholders from diverse backgrounds including disciplines, sectors and cultures across the continent, an opportunity to engage in innovative climate information service policy development.
Dr Richard Muita of the Institute for Meteorological Training and Research, Kenya pointed out that the involvement of local communities, as producers and end users of climate information is important.
“This should happen at all stages of developing the IKS climate change platform to create community ownership and sustainability of the process including policy development and implementation. This will mitigate the disjuncture between policy makers and communities,” Muita said.
The experts noted that IKS-CIS platform will allow collaboration between East Africa and Pan African Wiser components in knowledge management (KM) and offer guidelines for engagement with other initiatives such as BRACED, Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) among others.
It will also align itself with other KM strategies and processes in CIS, build on experiences of other KM initiatives in CIS (e.g. the Africa Adapt), and have mechanisms for reporting back on the performance of the IKS-Informed CIS platform and mechanisms for engaging with the wider CIS community through communications.
“This will be done through close coordination and collaboration with established initiatives and institutions at national and regional, continental and international levels and participation in the ongoing human capacity development initiatives such as curriculum development, short courses and training,” Matowanyika said.
Kaya said the platform’s broader achievements will be through formalised partnerships, networking and communication with ongoing initiatives for KM brokerage.
“We will be able to interface IKS-related climate information with conventional CIS to facilitate the transformation of existing CIS to become more accessible and relevant to local communities, achieved through co-production and co-design for strengthening and improving CIS with due consideration for international property rights (IPR),” Kaya said.
Faustine Ninga- United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), Tanzania said the platform will develop joint monitoring, evaluation and learning strategies that produce specific IKS-informed CIS with clear indicators, best practices and models.
“We will undertake a SWOT (Strength Weaknesses Opportunities and Threats) analysis of other KM initiatives in CIS Facilitating continuous participation of all stakeholders in co-production and co-design in the performance and relevance of the IKS-Informed CIS platform,” Ninga said.
Ninga also noted that there are mechanisms for reporting back on the performance of the IKS-Informed CIS platform.
“Regular monitoring and reporting of IKS-informed indicators and best practices, feedback from end-users through multi-media channels, annual, intermediate and end-term performance evaluation of the IKS-CIS and biannual internal meetings,” he said.
Protus Onyango of the Pan-African Media Alliance for Climate Change (PAMACC), Kenya said the IKS-CIS communication strategy will be representative and gender sensitive in its application.
“The communication strategy will be accessible and relevant IKS-informed communication multimedia system using integrated information and communication technologies and platforms that target diverse co-producers and end user groups and stakeholders that is culturally and linguistically acceptable in terms of norms and values,” Onyango said.
He added, “It will also address targeted diverse end user groups and stakeholders, be culturally and linguistically acceptable in terms of norms and values and engage strategically with journalists and the media in general.”
Pan-Africa IKS-CIS knowledge management and communication Strategy will encompass a synthesis of climate knowledge systems, which includes IKS, citizen science and conventional climate science.
The strategy will use local community radio stations, social media platforms like mobile phones, WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter and mainstream media.
The target audiences include farming and other community members, opinion leaders, urbanized and rural communities, women farmers, youth, traditional leaders, traditional health practitioners and schools.
Others are researchers, policy and decision-makers, government, specialist users of climate information, transport sectors, communication experts, and the media, funders and donors (resource mobilization), development agencies, traders, conservation NGOs, tourism and energy sectors among others.
The meeting is a follow up on an earlier workshop organized by the African Climate Policy Center (ACPC) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) on a knowledge management (KM) partnerships and communications in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia in May.
