ACCRA, Ghana (PAMACC News) - Ghana is poised to be a leader in the global movement to halt land degradation and deforestation which contribute to climate change and affects livelihoods.

The Ghana Dedicated Grant Mechanism (Ghana-DGM) project targets 52 communities within forest and transitional zones in the Brong Ahafo and Western regions. These local constituents will be empowered and supported with knowledge and financing to take steps to reorient their way of living to be sustainable, resilient and climate smart.

The project launch in the Brong Ahafo regional capital, Sunyani, received wide reception from interest groups, especially women, who are confident the initiative will help replenish the lost natural resources for the future generation.

Madam Akua Yeboah, a representative of queenmothers in the target areas, expressed gratitude for the intervention and appreciated the engagement of women in the project planning and implementation.

According to her, the local people are excited at the exposure to knowledge on the causes and impacts of extreme weather conditions.

“We the women are ready to throw in the needed support to make the Ghana DGM work to help improve our farms, livelihoods and marriages,” she said, adding that an enhanced livelihood leads to good marriages which help build good families.

The DGM Intervention

Unsustainable use of fuel wood, illegal logging and mining, uncontrolled wildfires, expansion of cocoa farms and other infrastructure development are factors militating against sustainable lands, forests and water bodies.

For a tropical country like Ghana, the reduction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere involves reducing deforestation, reforestation, and exploring affordable and sustainable alternatives to fuel wood.

Through the World Bank, the Climate Investment Fund is providing $5.5million to implement Ghana’s DGM over a five year period. Similar projects are being implemented in other countries including Mexico, Indonesia, Burkina Faso, Peru, Brazil and the Congo.

The core goal of the Ghana-DGM is to challenge the target communities to learn more about climate change and how it impacts their daily livelihoods.

“We believe that these very local communities are uniquely placed to help solve the degradation of lands and forests and improve it for their own benefit as well as for the benefit of Ghana,” said project team leader, Dr. Nyaneba Nkrumah.

She observed the daily decisions of these communities impact the forests, soils and water bodies, whilst the local people are also the first to feel the effects of unsustainable practices and climate change.

The project therefore seeks to help the communities to solve the problem by giving them the knowledge and the financing to be able to do so.

“We can make all the policies we want but unless local communities help; they have a part to understand how climate change affects their livelihoods and they can put it to practice what is needed to ensure sustainability in the forest zone, sustainability of the soils and water bodies in a long time to come,” said Dr. Nkrumah.

National Policy and Environmental Protection

Foresters have noted that the shade provided by one healthy matured tree is equivalent to ten room-size airconditioners running 20hours a day.

Local actors under the Ghana-DGM are ready to take advantage of the project to promote sustainable and climate smart practices.

Isaac Gyamfi of project partners, Solidaridad, believes strengthening the knowledge and skills about nature in the local communities will lead to building climate resilient communities that use smart ways to farm and cook.

Nana Oboaman Bofotia Boa Amponsem II of the Sunyani Traditional Council lauded the project, but cautioned political leadership to cease hypocritical utterances and rather act right to protect the environment.

“The environment and economies are destroyed by political leadership,” he observed. “They are building their political parties instead of the nation”.

The chief expects the legal department of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to wield prosecutorial powers to effectively enforce laws on the environment.

The Ghana DGM is expected to foster synergies to drive the implementation of the country’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) submitted to the United Nations Convention Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which has targets for climate mitigation and adaptation.

PAMACC in Abidjan, COTE D'IVOIRE

The Second Conference of the Parties to the Bamako Convention (also known COP 2) began this morning in Abidjan, the capital city of Cote d'Ivoire.

The conference will hold from 30th January to 1st February 2018 under the theme: "The Bamako Convention: a platform for a pollution-free Africa."

"COP 2 aspires to provide a platform to discuss ways and means of ensuring that the continent rids itself of hazardous wastes and contribute to the achievement of a pollution-free planet", says Mme Aida Keita M'bo, President of the COP and Malian Minister for Environment, Sanitation and Sustainable Development.

Host Minister and Ivoirian Minister for Public Health, Environment and Sustainable Development, Mme Anne Désirée Ouloto urged her colleagues to work torwards a COP 2 outcome that will "prevent Africa from becoming a dumping ground for toxic wastes through an effective implementation of the Bamako Convention”.

"The importation of hazardous waste into Africa is a crime against humanity and we must commit to prompt action aimed at overcoming barriers to effective management and minimization of waste in Africa through increased knowledge on waste scenarios in order to prevent harm to health and environment,” Mme Ouloto added.

"We have a collective responsibility to safeguard communities from the environmental and health consequences of hazardous waste dumping," said Ibrahim Thiaw, Deputy Executive Director of UN Environment.

"Africa is not the dustbin of the world" Thiaw added while reinstating UN Environment's commitment to a pollution-free world.

From Basel to Bamako Convention

The Bamako Convention is a treaty of African nations prohibiting the importation of any hazardous (including radioactive) waste into Africa.

The convention which came into force in 1998  is a response to Article 11 of the Basel convention which encourages parties to enter into bilateral, multilateral and regional agreements on Hazardous Waste to help achieve the objectives of the convention.

African Nations established the Bamako Convention in 1991 to complement the Basel Convention.

The Convention, which came into force in 1998, is aimed at protecting the health of populations and the environment of African countries through a ban on the import of all hazardous and radioactive wastes.

It also prohibits the dumping or incineration of hazardous wastes in oceans and inland waters, and promotes the minimization and control of trans-boundary movements of hazardous wastes within the African continent.

The Convention also aims to improve and ensure ecologically rational management and handling of hazardous waste within Africa, as well as the cooperation between African nations.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (PAMACC News) - Citizens of Africa have been urged to take advantage of investment opportunities that accompany climate action to earn some money and lift their people from poverty.
 
Secretary-General of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), Mithika Mwenda, has noted that the renewable energy revolution currently being witnessed in the world provides affordable access to energy to people who would otherwise not have access.
 
He noted that renewable energy has also aided in the reduction of emissions, thus contributing to the attainment of the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) ambitions of countries.
 
“We are witnessing renewable energy revolution and in Africa and the rest of the world, this is an explosive sector,” observed Mithika. “We need to take advantage of the investment opportunities coming with climate action; there are a lot of resources in this to help address poverty”.
 
At the COP21 climate talks which produced the Paris Agreement, the G7 committed to allocate US$10 billion into the African Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI).
 
Though there are concerns with delivering the promise, the Initiative, in its current design, will help cure chronic energy poverty by supporting decentralized, modern, off-grid and people-owned energy systems not only for lighting, but also cooking, driving smallholder agribusiness and charging mobile phones.
 
Mithika added that green energy has helped save lives by reducing indoor pollution.
 
Fossil fuel vs. renewable energy economies
 
Mithika Mwenda was addressing an event on low-carbon and climate-resilient development, held on the sidelines of the 2018 African Union Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
 
Most African countries do not contribute any significant amount of greenhouse gases but there are commitments in their NDCs to ensure that their development pathways are carbon neutral.
 
In a climate-constrained world, investment in fossil fuel-based energy sources no longer makes sense.
 
But Africa faces the dilemma of whether to rapidly revert to renewable energy, have a mix of both fossil fuels and renewables, or ignore the global call and continue in the unsustainable model of development pursued by industrialized countries which brought the climate crisis.
 
What is evident, though, is the fact that the global community has shifted.
 
This shift should make African countries re-think their priority energy sources and investment in oil and in some instances coal, as it may not make economic sense in the long-run.
 
The Addis Ababa side-event, attended by climate actors from across the continent, is organized strategically to get African leaders to focus attention on climate change issues.
 
As the first Pan African convention after the COP23, the event offered an opportunity to exchange ideas and reflect on Africa’s victories during the Bonn Climate Change Conference, with a view of charting a collective path towards subsequent Global Dialogue processes on the subject.
 
“This gives us the platform to develop common African narratives that will have impact on the global stage,” said James Murombedzi, Officer-in-Charge of the African Climate Policy Centre (ACPC) of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).
 
Moving along the development pathway
 
Climate change is no longer discussed as a limited environmental or scientific matter but as a development issue.
 
African civil society therefore looks forward to leaders moving from the rhetoric to taking real action on the ground.
 
“The momentum for the implementation of the Paris Agreement and the NDCs is picking up, but the question is: are we moving with that pace in Africa?” queried Mithika.
 
Some countries on the continent have developed very effective policy and legal frameworks to facilitate the implementation in the areas of transparency, adaptation, loss and damage, among others.
 
But there are others stuck on bureaucracies to push the climate agenda forward.
 
“We need to think broader about what is the impact of climate change on development. What does it mean for agriculture? What does it mean for energy, for infrastructure? So we are really talking about development,” said Mithika.
 
He believes that the ClimDev-Africa programme can rally the African continent around in mobilizing action and “we need to ensure that critical centres that support the livelihoods of the African people and which are weather sensitive like agriculture are created”.
 
The Climate for Development in Africa (ClimDev-Africa) Programme is an initiative of the African Union Commission (AUC), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the African Development Bank (AfDB), established to create a solid foundation for Africa’s response to climate change.

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopian (PAMACC News) - African civil society organizations on climate change have been at the forefront in building momentum for vulnerable people on the continent and other developing economies to access climate justice.

The voices were high and loud going into the UN Conference of Parties (COP21) on Climate Change which produced the historic Paris Agreement on Climate Change in 2015.

But these voices have gone down low after the talks.

Two years after Paris, most countries on the continent have slowed in climate action.

Sudanese scientist and climate activist, Dr. Shaddad Mauwa, has sat in meetings, shouted and held placards in demonstrations at the local, continental and global stages to clamour for climate justice.

He acknowledged that though African climate change actors – governments, parliamentarians, negotiators, civil society – are doing better than before, there seems to be a wall that has become difficult to break.

“There are many issues still not going in the line of what Africa will like to see,” he said.

For him, these issues include the commitment of developed economies to heed to the Paris Agreement in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, lack of access to climate funds by developing countries and poor implementation of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) to be climate-resilient.

Pushing the African Climate Agenda

The Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) has for almost a decade served as the largest advocacy platform for CSOs in Africa.

The activities of the Alliance resonates with the global call for action against climate change proclaimed by the United Nations, with a singular clarion call that no single individual, institution, country or region can single-handedly defeat the threats posed by the changing climate and the quest for achieving a sustainable development while leaving no one behind.

Secretary-General of the Organization, Mithika Mwenda, however, says the major concern is how to make the Paris Climate Agreement relevant to the vulnerable farmer who needs to irrigate his farm all year round to produce food and the community that gets displaced by flood anytime it rains.

“Having the Agreement is one thing and getting it implemented is another thing,” he said. “One of the things we’ve been trying to do is to push the governments to focus more on implementation because now we have a framework which is supposed to go on the ground”.

It is a shared opinion that Africa is not deficit in policy formulation. But getting the thoughts off paper to achieve set goals on the ground becomes problematic. Lack of finance for implementation is often cited as hindrance.

PACJA has been pushing the international community to provide sufficient funds for the implementation of provisions in the Paris Agreement, which includes each country’s NDCs, to ensure integration of climate change into the new paradigms of low-carbon development and climate resilience pathways.

“We are very optimistic, though it is not an easy thing to do. Africans and the global community have no choice; we have to act on climate change. We have frameworks in countries that if we build on, we can have very transformative economies,” said Mithika.

Building a stronger CSO Alliance

The adoption of the Paris Agreement left many stakeholders and countries unable to shift from the negotiation mode to implementation, including many civil society groups.

PACJA envisions a global environment free from the threat of climate change with sustainable development, equity and justice for all.

The Alliance acknowledges there is still more ground to cover around low-carbon, climate-resilient, green economy discourses.

At its Second Extra-Ordinary General Assembly meeting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on January 23, 2018, The Alliance elected the Continental Executive Board as the implementing organ of decisions and policies of the organization.

Newly elected Chairperson of the Board, John Bonds Bideri, says building capacities of local CSOs remains crucial to PACJA to support grassroots initiatives to deal with climate vagaries.

“The most important thing is that the vulnerable people should have that protection at the global, continental and community levels in terms of responding to issues or challenges that affect them,” he stated.