Governments and other stakeholders in Africa have been urged to commit adequate resources to dealing with climate change.
Just as the conference identified Africa continent as the most vulnerable to the danger of climate change ravaging the world in recent times.
According to a communiqué issued by Mr. Ademola Adeagbo at the end of an international conference on climate change held organized by the Departments of Urban and Regional Planning and Crop and environmental Protection, Ladoke Akintola University (LAUTECH), Ogbomoso between may 18 and 20 2016 ,“In Africa, there is a pressing need to mobilize resources to address the continent’s current limitations to deal with climate events, as well as resources to deal with future climate change.”
The conference which has more than 120 delegates from across the world was themed: “Climate change impact, adaptation and mitigation strategies, and declared open by Professor Adeniyi Sulaiman Gbadegesin, the Vice Chancellor of LAUTECH, represented by the Deputy Vice Chancellor, Professor Timothy Adebayo.
Discussions at the conference highlighted the various effects of climate change and gave various measures both adaptive and mitigative, by which it can be dealt with. More than 82 papers were presented at the conference with Professor Shem O. Wadinga, Chancellor of Egerton University and Acting Director of the Institute of Climate Change, University of Nairobi was the keynote speaker while Professor John Morton, Head of Livelihoods and Institutions Department, Natural Resources Institute, University of Greenwich, London and Professor J.O. Ajetomobi, Department of Agricultural Economics, LAUTECH delivered the lead papers.
The conference affirming that Africa was the most vulnerable continent observed that the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is on the increase due to the unabated industrial activities.
“The amount of Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere through industrial activities has increased while the man made activities that produce them have increased unabated. The impacts are affecting Africa the hardest due to low socio-economic developments, lack of infrastructure and technologies to mitigate Climate Change impacts, thus making the continent the most vulnerable in the world.”
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The conference highlighted some of the effects of climate change which included increasing temperature, ice melting, altering rainfall pattern, disruption of means of livelihood, increasing incidence of poverty, forced migration, shortage of water for domestic and industrial activities, health risks such as incidence of communicable diseases, and those that cause serious disabilities, as well as concentration of radon in the air which is a major cause of lung cancer, shortage of major food grains due to incidence and severity of crop diseases, livestock production and diminishing grazing land, damage to roads and other infrastructural facilities, disruptions to functioning of soil organisms and vulnerability of houses to flood and fire outbreak. The conference however lamented that disaster risk preparedness in the continent is very low.
It added, “Cities contribute to climate change through high demand for, and combustion of fossil fuel, emission of wastes, industrial activities, transportation, commercial and residential land use activities and settlement expansion. Cities in developing countries are particularly vulnerable, given their existing development challenges such as poverty, weak infrastructure, environmental degradation, limited resources and capacity constraints.”
Other recommendations of the conference aside commitment of resources to climate change mitigation include giving adaptation spending on climate investment a priority, mainstreaming climate change mitigative and adaptive measures into agricultural, industrial, housing, water and sanitation, transportation, and other relevant policies, creating awareness on the reality of climate change and its various options of mitigation and adaptation in relation to various impacts of climate change, giving priority to investment in agricultural research and development, and integration of indigenous knowledge and practices in mitigation and adaptation strategies.
Others are encouragement of adoption of organic agriculture, exploration of alternative energy for domestic and industrial purposes, innovative waste management techniques and sustainable city planning to minimize emission of green house gases, well-equipped weather stations in order to have reliable weather forecasts to enhance effective climate monitoring, prediction and early warning of extreme climate events, prohibition of attitudes and practices that hinder the actualisation of green city (poor waste management, deforestation, bush burning and overgrazing among others), empowerment of the people to build resilient buildings, adopt low energy materials for building construction and building maintenance, capacity building on adaptation strategies against fire outbreak, flood, windstorm, high and temperature, adoption of new heat-resistant road paving materials, greater use of heat-tolerant street and highway landscaping, protection of microbial biodiversity and enhancing ability of forest plantations to sequester carbon for climate change mitigation.
