From this year, countries would be expected to put
their climate proposals into action – major areas include adaptation,
mitigation and finance.
In sub-Saharan Africa, natural and human systems are
under the threat of climate change.
There are challenges to the continent’s dominant
rain-fed agriculture, sustainability of urban areas, overstretched health
services, water resources management and energy resources.
Research findings indicate that the length of growing
period of most crops in expected to drop below 90 days in the Sahel region,
heightening the insecurity of agricultural productivity and livelihoods of
smallholder farmers.
In Ghana for instance, food insecurity is predicted
with a decline in yields of 5-25% between 2000 and 2050 and a projected revenue
drop of 17-32%.
This a major issue requiring the attention of
researchers, policy makers and politicians.
“Improving the understanding of the vulnerability of
socially disadvantaged rural and urban dwellers, and critical social services
will require sound climate change and adaptation policies,” says Prof. William
Otoo Ellis, Vice-Chancellor of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and
Technology (KNUST).
He observed climate change awareness is often missing
in sectoral developmental policies and strategies as “some policies to the
benefit of one sector have been to the detriment of the other”.
A research centre within the KNUST, West African
Science Service Centre on Climate Change and Adapted Land Use (WASCAL), is
hosting a consultative workshop on this important national and global issue of
climate change.
It provides an opportunity to review existing knowledge
gap in the subject, build research networking capacity and ultimately provide
climate change research update for policy action.
Prof. Samuel Nii Odai, Director of KNUST WASCAL-CCLU,
says the workshop is exploring Ghana’s priority issues in climate change,
research agenda in the short to long term and public-private collaborations.
“We know government is doing its part but we believe that
as a university we need to take that initiative… if these things are not
properly covered in terms of generating new knowledge for where we live, that
is in Ghana and to put these in our policy briefs, what it means is that
government agencies will not even understand what is happening and how to
respond,” he noted.
Prof. Odai says the workshop has the advantage of
drawing inputs from the Paris Agreement for local implementation of action
plans.
“We are at the downstream so we are benefitting from
the knowledge generated in other countries. We are actually riding on knowledge
that has been made available; we are going to work on concrete information
which have been deliberated on and more synthesized,” he said.
He added that it has become critical for the country to
be ready for the worse scenario of climate change in the near future.
Prof. Jerome Omotosho of the Department of Meteorology
and Climate Change at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria, has
charged governments in Africa to commit resource to research and development,
if the continent is to win in tackling the phenomenon of climate change.
He says the threats posed by climate change to local
economies require substantial increase in budgetary allocation to tackle
environmental degradation.
“No research, no development,” he said.
