Tearfund: West Must Shoulder Africa’s Climate Burden

|TOP|Tearfund has urged Western countries to make a greater commitment to African countries bearing the brunt of the climate change problem.

Tadesse Dadi, a programme support adviser for Tearfund in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, said that the activities of Western countries were the principle cause of many of the daily struggles for Ethiopians, including the fight against malaria, find clean drinking water and grow crops and rear livestock.

“Many of the rural Ethiopians I meet do not directly associate the worst effects of climate change with human activities in richer countries,” he said in a special article written for the BBC’s Viewpoint.

“Yet it is precisely those Western activities which are principally behind the climate change they now experience in their daily lives.”

These daily problems have been compounded by the terrible drought that has devastated large parts of Somalia, southern Ethiopia and northern Kenya.

|QUOTE|Mr Dadi urged governments to follow up international treaties by sustaining their commitment to the process of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

Mr Mengesha, an 82-year-old farmer in northern Ethiopia, is just one of many people encountered by Dadi in Ethiopia struggling to produce sufficient crops amid erratic rainfall, while Mrs Suufee, a 62-year-old widow, has seen her sorghum crop fail two years out of five as a result of poor rains.

“In a nutshell, Western lifestyles are the principal cause of climate change; to Western societies falls the responsibility of supporting people like Mrs Suufee and Mr Mengesha as they struggle against its impacts,” he said.

“I think it is also important that governments and the people of developing nations take our share of responsibility in mitigating the effects of climate change.”

|AD|He also criticised Ethiopia for allowing deforestation and soil erosion to continue on for over half a century unabated.

“The nation has to wake up to the fact that it is destroying itself by letting its natural vegetation disappear, irrecoverably in some places,” said Dadi.
He called for more agricultural research to produce locally adaptable early maturing crops that can produce good harvests with variable rainfall patterns.

“Western support, targeted appropriately, could help develop new crop varieties able to withstand the harsher climates to come, and to spread the wisdom which our farmers will need,” said Dadi.

He challenged individuals in the UK, Europe and around the world to change their own lifestyles as well as to “be informed about the issues of climate change, to lobby decision makers in their countries and to mobilise support for NGOs engaged in helping poor countries adjust to climate change”.

Dadi concluded: “British media, particularly the BBC, exposed the famine disaster in the 1970s and 1980s that triggered the massive humanitarian response to save lives.

“Now the media in Britain and other Western countries can help prevent further disaster by alerting the world to the climate crisis facing countries like Ethiopia, and by urging their governments and peoples to accept that their lifestyles are responsible for the crisis.

“Supporting poor farmers to adjust to the worst effects of climate change will minimise the human tragedies that have haunted much of Africa during the last three to four decades.

“Although charity is a good thing and has indeed saved millions of lives, supporting people to stand on their own feet is a more dignified way of reaching out to people before it is too late.”