The
Senior Programme Specialist, International Development Research Centre (IDRC),
Edith Ofwona said agriculture which is the backbone of African continent is the
sector mostly affected by climate change, NaijaAgroNet reports.
“The
biggest challenge,” she disclosed “is how to work with communities not only to
cope with short-term impacts but actually to be able to adapt and be resilient
over time. We should come up with practical solutions that are affordable and
built on the knowledge that communities have.”
Ofwonaro,
NaijaAgroNet
gathered, took this position at the international scientific conference on ‘Our
Common Future under Climate Change’ which was held recently in Paris, which
marks commencement of programmes to usher in the United Nations Climate Change
Conference (COP21), also to be held in Paris in six months’ time, to pave the
way for a global agreement to keep the rise in the earth’s temperature under
2°C.
Experts
said temperature rise on the continent will likely exceed 2°C by 2100 with land
temperatures rising faster than the global land average. Scientific
assessments, NaijaAgroNet learnt,
agree that Africa will also face more climate changes in the future, with
extreme weather events increasing in terms of frequency, intensity and
duration.
“Most
sub-Saharan countries have high levels of climate vulnerability,” said an
independent specialist and one of the lead authors of the 5th
Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
South Africa, Penny Urquhart, “Over the years, people became good at adapting
to those changes but what we are seeing is increasing risks associated with
climate change as this becomes more and more pressing.
He
said data monitoring systems are still poor and sparse over the region, “we do
know there is an increase in temperature,” she stated adding that if the
global average temperature increases by 2°C by the end of the century, this
will be experienced as if it had increased by 4°C in Southern Africa, stated
Urquhart.
According
to the South African expert, vulnerability to climate variation is very
context-specific and depends on people’s exposure to the impacts, so it is hard
to estimate the number of people affected by global warming on the continent.
Cyriacus Nnaji/GEE
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