Africa's MDGs chances further eroded by climate change

12 December 2007 (ECA): Climate change will negatively affect the efforts of African countries to achieve the targets of the MDGs and sustainable development, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), Abdoulie Janneh, said today in Bali, Indonesia as the Conference on Climate Change enters a crucial ministerial segment.

In a statement delivered on his behalf by Josue Dione, ECAs's Director of Food Security and Sustainable Development, at a side-event organized by the five UN regional commissions, Mr. Janneh said while African countries were responsible for about 3.8 percent of the total green house gas emission, the continent was more vulnerable to the impact of climate change and lacks the capacity to cope with it.

Citing the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Stern Report, Janneh said water stress and water conflicts would increase in Africa due to climate change, affecting the livelihoods of millions of people on the continent.

“Water levels have seriously decreased in major lakes such as Victoria, Rift Valley and Lake Chad, which lost over 90 percent of its waters between 1973 and 2002,” Janneh said. He said climate change would also severely compromise agricultural production and food security by reducing yields from rain-fed agriculture by up to 50 percent in most African countries.

Africa's industrial development would also be impeded because of the reduced water flows to dams and depleted biomass energy resources, said Janneh. To safeguard its chances of achieving long-term sustainable growth and development, Janneh called on African countries to devise workable adaptation measures and mainstream climate risk management into their development strategies and plans.

Mr. Janneh said African leaders had expressed explicit commitments to addressing many of the challenges posed by climate change and that ECA would assist African countries in pursuit of this objective.

Earlier, during the high level segment, Mr. Janneh underscored ECA's three capacity development focus –collaboration in the Nairobi Framework to assist African countries in utilizing the Clean Development Mechanism; the Climate Information for Development (Clim-Dev Africa) Programme and ECA's efforts to establish an African Centre for Climate Policy Studies in collaboration with The Energy and Resources Institute, an organization associated with Nobel prize winner Rajendra Pachauri.