Climate Change Adaptation in the News

In Mozambique's province of Gaza, 9,240 tons of charcoal are produced every year placing pressure on the region's natural resources. Wood burning for charcoal production has led to high rates of deforestation.

Unfortunately, what is happening in the Gaza province mirrors a nationwide trend. Data from the Global Forest Watch show that Mozambique has lost nearly 3 million hectares – or 10 per cent – of its forests since 2000.

The UNDP project on Adaption in the Coastal Zones of Mozambique reported that natural resource pressures are threatening biodiversity, damaging essential ecosystems, aggravating climate change and destabilizing livelihoods.

If current rates of deforestation continue, the population of Mozambique will endure increasingly uncertain environmental and economic conditions.

As much as 80 per cent of the population still rely on wood and charcoal to provide fuel for essential activities, such as cooking. Feliciano dos Santos, Executive Director of a local development and environmental protection NGO called ESTAMOS, claimed that high energy prices are one of the key reasons why curbing deforestation is so complicated.

"Since gas is expensive, people end up using charcoal, and the problem is that large areas of forest are being cleared without replacement of trees." What more, energy costs are on an upward trend, which means the country will need to find sustainable, affordable fuel alternatives to reduce the economic demand for wood.

A critical element of a successful virus containment must include frequent hand washing with soap and water. UNDP, through programmes such as GoAL-WaSH and its Climate Change Adaptation portfolio, plays an active role in helping countries improve access to safely managed water, sanitation and hygiene.

The coroanavirus COVID-19 pandemic is affecting the world in unprecedented ways, from the enormous health challenges to a dramatic slowdown in the global economy, which is jeopardizing the welfare, food and economic security of tens of millions of people.   

Governments are taking aggressive steps to contain and control the spread of the virus through social distancing, testing, and contract tracing. It is well established that a major vector for transmission is human to human contact as well as human contact with infected surfaces. A critical element of a successful virus containment must include frequent hand washing with soap and water.

Based on the latest estimates by the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Programme, three billion people don’t have soap and water at home, 900 million children don’t have soap and water at school, and 40 percent of health care facilities were not equipped to practice hand hygiene. There are also large inequalities between and within countries with some populations having extremely low coverage of this basic, and vital amenity. More than 400 million people in rural India have limited household hygiene facilities while 40 million people in rural areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo have no hygiene facilities at all; 100 percent of rural Gambians have no household hygiene facilities. Globally, 36 percent of schools have no hygiene services; in Yemen, it’s 84 percent.

Even before COVID-19, these gaps in access to hygiene services and safely managed drinking water and sanitation services were causing massive harm to people’s health, education, and economic opportunities in many of the world’s developing nations. The lack leads to increased incidences of water-borne diseases, particularly diarrhea which killed 829,000 people in 2016. Diseases like these also keep millions of children out of school and diminish women’s opportunities to create new economic enterprises. Overall, it’s estimated that even before COVID-19, inadequate hand hygiene resulted in nearly 300,000 deaths annually, with the majority of deaths being among children younger than five.

The critical importance of safe water, sanitation and hygiene to the 2030 agenda for sustainable development was recognized in UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) 6.1 and 6.2:

• 6.1 By 2030, achieve universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all;
• 6.2 By 2030, achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation, paying special attention to the needs of women and girls and those in vulnerable situations.

Even before COVID-19, the World Health Organization estimated that universal access to safe drinking water and adequate sanitation and hygiene would reduce the global disease burden by about 10 percent. In urban areas, for every US$1 invested in basic sanitation, the return in saved medical costs and increased productivity is $2.5 while in rural areas, each $1invested returns on average more than $5.

UNDP, through programmes such as GoAL-WaSH and its Climate Change Adaptation portfolio, plays an active role in helping countries improve access to safely managed water, sanitation and hygiene. GoAL-WaSH supported the post-conflict government in Liberia to set up a national regulatory body for the water supply and sanitation sectors. In the Maldives, a project financed by the Green Climate Fund will bring safe drinking water to more than 100,000 people across 49 of the Outer Islands.

The Ministry of Health has warned that Cambodia should expect a week-long of extreme weather – cautioning “at-risk” workers, as temperatures are expected to peak at more than 40 degrees Celsius and result in strong storms. The warning reiterates the heavy toll extreme weather has on the Kingdom’s much-needed productivity growth, considered a main driver to achieving its goal of becoming an upper-middle income economy by 2030.

Resident Representative of the United Nations Development Programme in Cambodia Nick Beresford said yesterday that Cambodia is particularly vulnerable to temperature increases, which affects worker productivity and health in key sectors including agriculture, construction and garment manufacturing.

“Recent modelling conducted by the Ministry of Economy and Finance and the National Council for Sustainable Development shows that reduced worker productivity because of increasing temperatures will be the most significant impact of climate change on the Cambodian economy between now and 2050, before the impact of other extreme climate events such as floods and droughts,” Beresford said the UNDP in Cambodia has implemented the Cambodia Climate Change Alliance, supported by the EU, Sweden and the UNDP with support from the Cambodian government and academic institutions to research in more detail how these temperature increases affect various types of workers – as well as school children.

El representante residente del Programa de las Naciones Unidas para el Desarrollo (PNUD), José Vicente Troya, destacó en una entrevista con Efe la necesidad de Costa Rica de redoblar esfuerzos hacia una economía verde, como medida de protección social para enfrentar los efectos de la pandemia del COVID-19.

En el análisis del PNUD "Evaluación económica inicial de los efectos de COVID-19 y alcance de las opciones de política en Costa Rica", los expertos afirman que el país deberá proteger a los grupos más vulnerables de la población y evitar el riesgo de afrontar problemas futuros ante la falta de sostenibilidad de sus finanzas públicas, ahora más transgredida por el coronavirus.