Isaiah Esipisu

 The Christian Aid, a British based nongovernmental organisation has teamed up with the umbrella of African civil society organisations under the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) to urge environment ministers expected at the ongoing talks to amend the Montreal protocol in Kigali, Rwanda to negotiate for an early phase down date of gases that deplete the ozone layer.

 “It’s fitting that ministers will be arriving here at the summit because it is their governments’ credibility that will be on the line if we don’t get a strong outcome,” said Benson Ireri, the Senior Policy Officer for Africa at Christian Aid.

 The gasses being targeted for the phase down are in the group of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are used in cooling systems such as refrigerators and air conditioners. The phase down process calls for the manufacturers of these gases to stop doing so, and substitute it with Hydrocarbons (HCs).

 “In the Paris Agreement, national leaders promised to keep global warming to a level well below 2 degrees centigrade and to try their hardest to limit it to 1.5 degrees. However, those promises will ring hollow if we don’t get an early date for the global phase down of HFCs,” said Ireri. 

 “These chemicals are thousands of times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas and are increasing in use by 10-15% a year,” he added.

 Mithika mwenda, the Secretary General for PACJA echoed Ireri’s sentiments, saying that the phase down is a key mitigation action, which will enable the global community to meet the provisions of the Paris Agreement.

 “It would be disastrous for communities at the frontline of climate crisis if the  Agreement came into force next month and countries had failed their  first test by failing to agree on an ambitious deal during this 28th  Session of Montreal Procotol,” said Mwenda.

 According to Ireri, the vulnerable countries do not have time to wait because the climate is changing fast. “Phasing down HFCs is something which we absolutely must do if we’re going to honour the pledges of the Paris Agreement,” he said.

 “It’s time for ministers to step on the gas and ensure phase down dates in the early 2020s,” added Ireri.

KIGALI, Rwanda (PAMACC News) – Before the year 1990 most of the refrigeration and air conditioning equipments operated using some gas called chlorofluorocarbon also known as CFC. This is an organic compound that contains only carbon, chlorine, and fluorine, produced as volatile derivative of methane, ethane, and propane. Unfortunately, the CFC was found to be a lethal greenhouse gas that mainly depleted the ozone layer.

With the commitment of the world to reduce emission of greenhouse gases (compounds that are able to trap heat in the atmosphere), because they make the earth much warmer than naturally expected, leading to climate change, the world agreed to phase out CFC, and instead adopted use Hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) as a safer option.

However, with more studies, it has become clear that HFCs are not as safe to the environment as earlier thought.

“HFCs were created to replace HCFCs (hydrochlorofluorocarbons), which in turn replaced CFCs, after it was discovered that the gases were putting a hole in the ozone layer.  But we didn’t realise that in HFCs we had created another thing that is even more devastating than Carbon dioxide,” said Gabi Drinkwater, a Senior Policy expert working for Christian Aid.

And now, scientists are in the process of replacing the HFCs with a new gas formula known as hydrocarbons (HC).

The HC is an elementary compound of hydrogen and carbon which occurs naturally and is found in large concentrations in crude oil. According to experts, non-toxic hydrocarbons are an eco -friendly alternative to the CFC,HCFC and HFC fluorocarbon ozone damaging elements.

It is based on this knowledge that representatives of different states from all over the world are meeting in Kigali Rwanda, to draw a roadmap on how people are going to shift from use of HFC based refrigeration and air conditioning systems to HC based systems.

This calls for countries and companies that have invested so much in production of HFCs to freeze their production. And this has leads to a huge debate related economics of investment. The other argument is about where the existing gadgets will be dumped, and at whose cost.

By the end of the week on October 15, the negotiators will have come up with the way forward to determine when the phase-out should commence, where the funding will come from, and how the money will be invested in the process.

But so far, some countries have already started producing refrigerators that use HC. In Africa for example, Palfridge Ltd, a fridge manufacturing company in Southern Africa has already switched to production of fridges that use HC.

“Apart from being environment friendly, the HC based fridges are energy efficient, produce less heat, and the compressors do not produce much noise,” said Tumani Chidyamarambe, an engineer working for Paldridge in Swaziland.

Most African states are hopeful that developed countries will help them switch before 2025.

LOME, Togo (PAMACC News) - When logging concessions are issued with very limited terms, they are often spotlighted by conservationists as harbingers of ecological harm to come. Another serious threat is the existence of logging roads that have continued to damage the environment and forest even after the logging stops.

A new study by forest experts has found out that logging, both legal and illegal, remains a lucrative business that has contributed to the rapid shrinking of Africa’s rainforests and woodlands.

According to Ajewole Opeyemi Isaac of the department of forest resource management of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria, the challenges associated with logging in the tropical rainforest in West and Central Africa are the root cause of the rapid depletion of forest resources in these regions.

Key among these challenges is bad governance with limited term timber concessions that breeds corrupt practices, poor planning and management.

“Limited-term timber concessions encourages short-term resource depletion, and poor forest planning and management, corruption which makes existing forestry laws nearly unenforceable,” Ajewole said  at the presentation of his research paper during the African Forest Forum in Lome-Togo September 27, 2016.

He said there was lack of transparency in commercial transactions with corrupt officials granting concessions to cronies without regard for the environment or consideration of local people.
The study also highlighted the construction of logging roads to reach forest resources as destructive factor to the ecology in its own rights.

“Logging roads have long term destruction of forest as it encourages settlement of previously inaccessible forest lands by speculators, land developers and poor farmers,” he said.  

Other studies experts say have found out that along these logging roads and landing areas, the soil increasingly becomes more dense and compact with slower water infiltration than in the surrounding, untouched areas of the forest.

According to Stephen Anderson, a professor of soil science at the University of Missouri and coauthor of the study published in Geoderma and conducted by researchers at the University of Missouri in the U.S, “This can cause many environmental challenges in forests because dense soil prevents rainwater from soaking in, triggering run off and causing erosion. This erosion can carry fertile topsoil away from forests, which enters streams and makes it difficult for those forests being logged to regenerate with new growth as well as polluting surface water resources.”

The repercussions, the study says can last far longer than the logging itself. The researchers found that logging roads and log landing areas were significantly denser and less able to absorb water four years after timber harvesting had ended. This can detrimentally affect the ability of logged forests to regenerate, the study revealed.

Researchers at the African Forest Forum agreed that logging roads around the in many countries in the continent are piercing farther and farther into once-untouched forest in the quest for timber.

“Logging roads are a major threat and cause for concern,” noted Nganje Martin, consultant with the African Forest Forum. The scenario is the same in Africa just like other forest areas in the world he pointed.

Satellite images by the Monitoring Amazon Andean Project, MAAP for example, found new logging roads snaking through primary Amazon rainforest in the Ucayali region of Peru. Other findings from MAAP include illegal logging roads through protected areas.

In the Republic of Congo, the forest monitoring platform Global Forest Watch shows a large network of logging roads spreading through Congo Basin forest over the past few years.

The multiplication of such roads experts say are caused by illegal logging triggered by poverty, weak governance and absence of sustainable forest management.

The developments the experts say have devastating consequences such as loss or degradation of forests resulting in the loss of habitats and biodiversity, significant loss of government revenue, loss of future sources of employment and export earnings.

The African Forest Forum accordingly seeks to generate and share knowledge and information through partnerships in ways that will provide inputs into policy options and capacity building efforts in order to improve forest management in a manner that better addresses poverty eradication and environmental protection in Africa.

LUSAKA, Zambia (PAMACC News) – Ahead of COP 22 in less than two months, Civil Society Organisations working on climate related activities in Zambia have been urged to intensify their sensitisation programmes on climate change.

Speaking during the CSO Paris Agreement review meeting in Lusaka, Richard Lungu, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) country focal point in Zambia reminded delegates of their critical role in simplifying the Paris Climate Agreement to the masses.

Lungu, who also announced the recent approval of the country’s climate change policy by cabinet, believes CSOs have a greater responsibility of educating the masses on the implications of the Paris Agreement in their lives.

“Our economy is natural resource intensive,” he said, adding “it is incumbent upon us to make people understand the Paris Agreement provisions and what they mean for the implementation of our Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC).”

The UNFCCC Zambia Focal Point, who is also the Chief Environmental Officer at the Ministry of Lands, Natural Resources and Environmental Protection, said government wants to see an active involvement of CSOs especially in the implementation of the climate change policy.

“Now that we have an agreement in place, COP 22 and beyond is about implementation and requires support in form of ideas from all concerned stakeholders so that Zambia, and Africa in general, continues with its push for a successful implementation of the Paris Agreement,” emphasizedLungu, stressing that Africa remains a vulnerable region to climate change with limited capacity to cope without external support.

Organised by Green Enviro Watch with support from Oxfam Zambia, the CSO meeting was called to deliberate on the linkages between the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in the context of the country’s development agenda.

Adopted in New York in September last year, SDGs have become a foundation on which governments are anchoring their sustainability actions. However public sensitization and awareness has been low, prompting the CSOs to brainstorm and chart the way forward.

“Our goal is to carry everyone on board especially youth and rural populations who are ironically the most affected by policy decisions and/or omissions,” said Abel Musumali, Green Enviro Watch Executive Director.

He said “while Africa continues to push certain demands collectively especially on finance and technology transfer, national circumstances as outlined in the NDC have become a key focus area in the implementation stage of the land mark climate agreement.”

Meanwhile, French Ambassador to Zambia, Emmanuel Cohet implored the CSO representatives to work in partnership with one another not only to strengthen their proposals for support from development partners, but also complimenting each other’s capacities in terms of project implementation.

Cohet assured that his government remains committed to aspirations of the global community as espoused in the Paris Agreement to which France played a key role to achieve.

And in amplifying the role of partnerships, Oxfam Zambia Humanitarian Programme Manager, Teddy Kabunda said there is more to be gained when working in synergies.

“We know that government is making a lot of progress but as civil society, we need to do our part by helping to move climate change matters away from being an exclusive subject to the elite, hence our approach to support CSO networks who are more closer to the community,” stressed Kabunda, pointing out that the importance of ordinary people’s involvement to the actualization of the Paris Agreement cannot be overemphasized.