By: Nghiinomenwa Erastus
The 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Sixth Assessment Report on climate change suggests a reduction in ground cover and reduced net primary productivity by 2080 for Namibia.
The study estimated changes in grass biomass ranging from around −10% in the woodland of the northeast, about −5% in the savanna, and everywhere −15% in the southern karoo areas.
The findings were also highlighted by the country Environmental Investment Fund” chief executive officer, Benedict Libanda, during their sponsor for a seed bank in Kavango West Region.
He explained that the change affects food production as soils become poor and reduce crop pollination efficiency.
Libanda also noted that Namibia is recovering from an unprecedented drought period that has been ongoing for eight years. The ecosystem is deteriorating due to a contestant and intensive farming and climate change, putting biodiversity at risk.
“Hence conserving our generic resources is essential if we are to counter those trends that are threatening our biodiversity,” he said.
Libanda added that identifying and conserving genetic resources is the country’s only way to preserve our plant biodiversity.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change.
The IPCC’s mandate involves providing available scientific information and evidence to inform climate action by multiple actors, notably governments (including international alliances) in the context of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The report warns that if average warming passes 1,5 degrees Celsius, even humanity’s best adaptation efforts may falter.
The report highlighted that adaptation efforts had been observed across all sectors and regions, generating multiple benefits in response to these impacts.
However, the researchers indicated in the report that adaptation progress is ‘unevenly distributed’ as well as fragmented, small in scale, and incremental.
The report highlighted that these gaps are “partially driven by widening disparities between the estimated costs of adaptation and documented finance allocated to adaptation”, the report highlighted.
According to the report, the overwhelming majority of global climate finance has been targeted at climate change mitigation.
The report highlighted that weak governance and poor integration of information in Namibia, such as disregarding knowledge of urban and rural residents in flood management strategies, has resulted in soft limits to adaptation.
This leads to temporary or permanent relocation of communities, while a shortage of land – namely high population pressure and small per capita land holding – leads to continuous cultivation and poor soil fertility.
This low productivity in the country is further aggravated by erratic rainfall causing soft limits as farmers cannot produce enough and must depend on food aid.
INTERDEPENDENCE OF CLIMATE, ECOSYSTEM, AND BIODIVERSITY
The report recognizes the interdependence of climate, ecosystems, biodiversity, and human societies, and it integrates knowledge more strongly across the natural, ecological, social, and economic sciences than earlier IPCC assessments.
The assessment of climate change impacts and risks and adaptation is set against concurrently unfolding non-climatic global trends such as biodiversity loss, overall unsustainable consumption of natural resources, land and ecosystem degradation.
These interactions are the basis of emerging risks from climate change, ecosystem degradation, and biodiversity loss and, at the same time, offer opportunities for the future.
The IPCC report explained that human society causes climate change.
Through hazards, exposure and vulnerability, climate change generate impacts and risks that can surpass limits to adaptation and result in losses and damages.
Even though human society can adapt to, maladapt, and mitigate climate change, ecosystems can adapt and mitigate within limits- at the same time, human society can restore and conserve them.
The report indicated that recognizing climate risks can strengthen adaptation, mitigation actions, and transitions that reduce risks.
However, the researchers pointed out that taking action is enabled by governance, finance, knowledge and capacity building, technology, and catalyzing conditions for transformation.
Transformation entails system transitions strengthening the resilience of ecosystems and society, read the report.
The IPCC researchers wrote that climate risk provides a framework for understanding the increasingly severe, interconnected, and often irreversible impacts of climate change on ecosystems, biodiversity, and human systems.
At the same time, differing impacts across regions, sectors, and communities; and how to best reduce adverse dynamic interactions among climate-related hazards.
It also reveals the exposure and vulnerability of affected human and ecological systems.
The risk that human responses can introduce to climate change is another new aspect considered in the risk concept.
The report described the vulnerability of exposed human and natural systems as a component of risk and independently.
Moreover, climate change vulnerability widely differs within communities and across societies, regions, and countries, changing through time.
Once the vulnerability has been documented, adaptation plays a crucial role in reducing exposure and susceptibility to climate change, explained the IPCC researchers.
“Adaptation in ecological systems includes autonomous adjustments through ecological and evolutionary processes,” read the report.
In human systems, adaptation can be anticipatory or reactive and incremental or transformational.
The latter, however, changes the fundamental attributes of a social-ecological system in anticipation of climate change and its impacts.
Resilience in the climate change literature has a wide range of meanings.
However, the IPCC team explained that climate change adaptation is often organized around resilience, bouncing back and returning to a previous state after a disturbance.
More broadly, the term describes the ability to maintain essential function, identity, and structure and the capacity of communities for transformation.
The report also recognizes the value of diverse forms of knowledge such as scientific, indigenous knowledge, and local knowledge in understanding and evaluating climate adaptation processes and actions to reduce risks from human-induced climate change.
The IPCC climate assessment report highlights effective adaptation solutions, feasible1, and conform to principles of justice.
While used in different ways in different contexts by other communities, the term climate justice generally includes three principles for the IPCC.
Distributive justice refers to allocating burdens and benefits among individuals, nations, and generations; procedural justice refers to who decides and participates in decision-making.
Lastly, a recognition justice entails basic respect and robust engagement with and fair consideration of diverse cultures and perspectives.
The fight and recognition of climate change in the country are still primarily rooted in theoretical policy with tiny implementation or practicality except for a few institutions such as EIF and other environmental-related NGOs.
However, at the private entity level, the country is yet to subscribe to protocols such as Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) that offer more valuable benchmarks and guidance on environmental issues. Email: erastus@thevillager.com.na
