Alex Rose-Innes
BLURB:
The decisions made regarding climate change during this century, would be the most important for the future of the plant – Sir David Attenborough
With fiscal and social constraints as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, many countries had to adjust budgets and programmes and it is predicted that it would be more challenging to meet climate change parameters agreed upon during the Paris Agreement last year.
It is being said that the pandemic could be seen as a further call to climate change with planet Earth buckling under damage done during the last eight decades. In 1896, world-renowned Swedish scientist and Nobel Prize Winner, Svante Arrhenius, (1859-1927), had already described how CO2 (greenhouse gas emissions) affected the climate, with 1988 the year when climate change became an issue.
Forecasters say the pandemic is expected to severely inhibit global economic growth, with Africa the hardest hit. Income levels across the continent are predicted to drop substantially, raising poverty levels and affecting food scarcity. Across Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), it is expected that 90% of countries would not be able to feed an additional 40 million people, affecting women and children the hardest.
With revenues free-falling, the impact on programmes to limit greenhouse gas emissions on the continent is predicted to be put on the back burner in order to protect vulnerable populations and economies. Funding for climate change adaptation and mitigation would not be a priority or even a possibility.
Even before the pandemic, SSA, with poor fiscal governing, wars and increasing natural disasters, saw the region battle to address climate shocks. Increasing reliance on agriculture with droughts and cyclones severely impacted livelihoods and food shortages. Rising inflation and a general drop in Gross Domestic Production were especially felt in South Africa, Nigeria and Angola as COVID-19 took hold. The current global financial crisis is seen as the worst economic inhibitor since the Great Depression of 1929 to 1933.
Evidence clearly shows that the economic impacts of the pandemic are hitting women harder than men, with job losses across informal sectors where mostly women are employed.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations said in a statement that with the evolution of COVID-19 not being clear, Africa would continue to suffer as diminishing water resources, people migration and hunger affect the SSA and better fiscal conditions were only expected by 2024. This would also have a serious detrimental effect on global investment in greening efforts across the continent especially at a time when it is most needed.
