Cartoon by Francis Odupute
Climate change: The Loss and Damage
The nineteenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP19) to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the ninth session of the Conference of Parties Serving as the Meeting of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP/MOP9, among other associated meetings, held from 11th to 23rd November, 2013 in Warsaw, Poland. One of the major outcomes of the conference is the Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage associated with climate change impacts.
This piece attempts to highlight some key issues and implications for government, business and the society.
In 2010, the COP16 decided to establish a work programme to consider approaches to dealing with Loss and Damage from the impact of climate change in the developing countries which are particularly venerable to the adverse effects of climate change. The most venerable countries are supposed to benefit ultimately through this programme from improved protection against loss and damage caused by extreme metrological phenomenon linked to climate change. This is a very significant step forward as the developed countries frequently prefer to avoid any decision likely to involve their responsibility.
In Doha in 2012, the establishment of an institutional arrangement for the mechanism for Loss and Damage proved somehow controversial. The developing countries proposed it but developed countries opposed it. It took an all-night last minute negotiation for a text to be agreed on the establishment of an institutional arrangement at COP19 in Warsaw, Poland.
The conference stressed the role of the convention in providing the implementation of approaches to address Loss and Damage to include:
- Enhancing knowledge and understanding of comprehensive risk management approaches.
- Strengthening dialogue among relevant stakeholders.
- Enhancing action and support including finance, technology and capacity building to address Loss and Damage.
The Parties (member countries) were invited to enhance action addressing Loss and Damage by (a) designing and implementing country – driver risk management strategies and approaches,
(b) implementing comprehensive climate risk management approaches and (c) promoting an enabling environment that would encourage investment and the involvement of relevant stakeholders in climate risk management.
The COP requested developed county parties to provide developing country parties finance, technology and capacity building.
In COP19, after series of negotiations it was agreed to, as proposed by the President of COP19, that an institutional mechanism including functions and modalities to address Loss and Damage associated with the impact of climate change in developing countries are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change be established.
The Warsaw International Mechanism for Loss and Damage under the Cancun Adaptation Framework is “to address Loss and Damage associated with impacts of climate change including extreme events and slow onset events in developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effect of climate change.”
The Warsaw Mechanism is expected to promote the implementation of approaches to address Loss and Damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change, provide leadership, enhance knowledge and understanding of comprehensive risk management approaches to address Loss and Damage, collection, sharing, management and use of relevant data and information.
The Implications
The UNFCCC Loss and Damage mechanism has raised fundamental issues in knowledge and understanding of comprehensive management approaches.
The impact of Loss and Damage associated with climate change is likely to increase the incidence and severity of poverty in countries that are vulnerable to climate change. In Nigeria there are evidences of loss associated with climate change – agriculture-wash-away of crops leading to poor harvest, health – disease outbreak and increasing climate impacts on vulnerable regions.
As climate change continues unabated, economic losses from extreme weather events and natural disasters are expected to increase. In Nigeria, climate change has implications for development. The 2012 flood experience showed that losses caused by weather -related natural catastrophes are enormous. As the frequency and scope of losses due to natural catastrophes increase there is a growing need to explore meaningful risk transfer options for managing and mitigating climate change risks. One of such feasible option is climate risk insurance.
Approach
The path of reducing poverty and vulnerability through climate risk insurance can be a business case that can provide window of opportunities for insurance companies.
The impact of Loss and Damage associated with climate change is likely to increase the incidence and severity of poverty in Nigeria.
Poverty is a root cause of vulnerability as low income individuals have fewer resources to absorb extreme weather shocks. By increasing their ability to manage as well as to mitigate weather-related risks, climate risk insurance has the potential to play a significant role in reducing vulnerability and contributing to social and economic well-being.
It is important for us as a nation to get to the drawing board and see how Nigeria can benefit from different global climate finance opportunities. The negotiation is still on-going and the implementation options can include such elements as climate risk management facility, capacity building, filling data gaps and identifying financial needs.
The most vulnerable countries to Loss and Damage due to climate change should not look for one solution or fold their arms; rather they should consider various tools that can be implemented at various levels.
It is suggested that (i) we consider future needs associated with possible approaches to address the risk elements, (ii) invest in preparing technical papers on non-economic losses and on gaps in existing institutional arrangement globally to address loss and damage, and (iii) design and implement country-driven risk management strategies and approaches.
It is clear that even without taking climate change into account, disaster risk will continue to increase as more people and assets are exposed to weather extreme. It is therefore desirable that we embark on capacity building, training and involvement of all stakeholders in addressing the challenges and opportunities in the Loss and Damage.
By Prince Lekan Fadina
Prince Fadina is a Negotiator in the United Nations System on Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Trade. He is Executive Director, Centre for Investment, Sustainable Development, Management and Environment (CISME)
Savvy, razzmatazz of Davos
The World Economic Forum (WEF) has emerged as an international forum that unites political and business leaders as well as journalists from across the globe to discuss and shape global, regional and industrial agendas with regard to economics, health and the environment.
The WEF is a Swiss non-profit foundation based in Cologny, Geneva. Describing itself as an independent international organisation committed to improving the state of the world, it is best known for its annual meeting in Davos, a mountain resort in Graubünden, in the eastern Alps region of Switzerland. The meeting brings together some 2,500 top business leaders, international political leaders, selected intellectuals and journalists to discuss the most pressing issues facing the world.
This year’s edition held during the past week from Wednesday to Saturday, with Nigeria featuring prominently and President Goodluck Jonathan saying his administration is enhancing inclusive growth in the country through policies and programmes that focus on wealth creation rather than poverty alleviation.
Jonathan said in Davos that African governments must likewise earnestly promote inclusive economic growth on the continent to avoid problems associated with poverty and financial equality. He argued that, with Africa’s population projected to exceed two billion persons by the year 2050, wealth creation and job creation must remain at the top of the continent’s developmental agenda.
Essentially, the 2014 WEF meeting sought to develop insights, initiatives and actions necessary to respond to current and emerging global challenges. The theme focused on “The Reshaping of the World: Consequences for Society, Politics and Business.”
Conflict and political unrest have been prevalent running up to this year’s meeting. In the wake of the Arab spring, incessant unrest in North Africa and the Middle East continue to limit the potential for peace and economic prosperity in the region. The war in Syria has resulted in more than two million refugees seeking safety in neighbouring countries, such as Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.
These nations have been struggling with the magnitude of the crisis. According to the UN, close to nine million Syrian people are in desperate need of foreign aid. These are but some of the challenges faced by political and business leaders in their pursuit of making the world a better place.
Apart from the various socio-economic dilemmas that have developed as a result of conflict and political unrest, dialogue at Davos was also shaped by global environmental, social and economic issues such as climate change, multilateral trade as well as the post-2015 development agenda. Climate change in particular was top priority at Davos this year.
One distinguished attendee was Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, who is co-chair of the annual meeting. As of March, 2013 his wealth was estimated by Forbes to be in the region of $16.1 billion.
A dedicated philanthropist and the founder of Dangote Group, West Africa’s largest publicly listed corporation, the Nigerian was also appointed to the United Nations’ Global Education First Initiative (GEFI) launched by Ban Ki-Moon.
Echoing the UN Secretary-General’s advocacy for improving access to education, the GEFI basically aims to put every single child in school. Klaus Schwab wrote in his invitation letter to Dangote that his “participation as co-chair will contribute significantly to the substance and relevance of exchanges between global leaders from government, business, academia, civil society, and the media at the forum.”
In spite of the media attention Davos receives for the protests, the exclusivity, the lavish dinners, the alleged million dollar parties thrown by tech billionaires and the speculation about the private words exchanged outside of the official sessions; there was possibly no better stage for the most influential men and women to meet and discuss how to make the world a better place. When one is able to see the wealth and influence of the participants as a force for positive change, Davos-Klosters can be seen as a platform for incredible political, social and economic progression.
The Forum was founded in 1971 by Klaus Schwab, a German-born business professor at the University of Geneva. First named the “European Management Forum”, it changed its name to the World Economic Forum in 1987 and sought to broaden its vision further to include providing a platform for resolving international conflicts.
Political leaders soon began to use the annual meeting as a neutral platform. The Davos Declaration was signed in 1988 by Greece and Turkey, helping them turn back from the brink of war. In 1992, South African President F. W. de Klerk met with Nelson Mandela and Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi at the annual meeting, their first joint appearance outside South Africa. At the 1994 annual meeting, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat reached a draft agreement on Gaza and Jericho.
The Forum engages its members in sector-specific initiatives such as the Global Health Initiative (launched by Kofi Annan in 2002), Global Education Initiative (2003), Environmental Initiative that covers climate change and water (2005), Water Initiative and Partnering Against Corruption Initiative (2004).
The organisation also convenes some six to eight regional meetings each year in locations such as Latin America and East Asia, as well as undertaking two further annual meetings in China and the United Arab Emirates. Beside meetings, the foundation produces a series of research reports.
Ahead COP21: France seeks partnership with oil producing nations
Oil producing countries in Africa have been urged to partner on climate change. This will provide the synergy needed to promote acceptable international best practices in oil production and services across the world.
The French Minister of Development, Pascal Canfin, stated this recently in Abuja at a dinner during a working visit to Nigeria on environmental issues and innovative finance.
“Nigeria can initiate a platform to work with other oil producing countries in Africa. By doing this they can set achievable objectives on gas flaring and oil spills to, say, achieve a 50% reduction in a given year,” he stated.
Describing climate change as critical to national and international development, Canfin said climate partnership in Africa would project the continent’s commitment to issues of climate change in view of the 2015 Climate Change Conference scheduled to hold in Paris.
“My mission in Nigeria is to discuss climate change because France is going to host the big conference (COP21) in 2015 where we are supposed to find decisive global climate agreement. The COP21 is a very important responsibility and is one of the top priorities of the French diplomacy. So we are starting to work on that and we want Nigeria to be a key partner for us in this process.”
The minister also shed light on innovative finance, saying that it was a project aimed at finding new sources to finance development.
He said: “We are working with Nigeria and 40 other countries across the world to have commitments in order to implement new mechanisms to finance spending in terms of healthcare, education and to fight poverty, etc. It is development taken in a very broad sense but dedicated and focusing on local communities. France took a lot of decisions on innovative finance.
“For instance, we decided to tax on our financial transactions in Paris and we allocate 15% of this tax to finance fight against poverty in developing countries. We are able to finance free access to health care for five million people in the Sahel region, Senegal, Chad, Niger and Mali. France is the very first country to take such step in the world.”
In the same vein, the Ambassador of France to Nigeria, Jacques Chanpagne De Labriolle, disclosed that his country was working to reinforce relations in every field of bilateral engagement with Nigeria.
“The issue of development and climate change are issues that are very important to everyone in the world. This is what we call global issues. And because they want to work more closely in the future, France and Nigeria are trying to work together on issues of climate change.”
De Labriolle said France remained committed to the fight against climate change and was willing to support Nigeria in that regard. He remarked that he also believed that the outcomes of oil production such as gas flaring in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria can be managed to provide electricity for that region.
“We have realised that one of the group of countries that can help the international community to work together is the group of the oil producing countries, as part of the problem of the oil producing countries is that there is associated pollution. And as they have an important income from oil we believe that they should get together to address the consequences of climate change linked to those entire phenomenon that are provoked by the use of hydro-carbon,” he concluded.
By Nkechinyere Itodo
COP 19: From Lekan Fadina to Hamzat Lawal
During the 19th Session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 19) to the United Nations Framework Conventions on Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC) that held last November in Warsaw, Poland, two Nigerians easily caught my attention. One is in his sixties; the other in his twenties. Both had an aura of ingrained climate passion exuding from their restless personalities. And because they belonged to different generations and yet spoke the same language and radiated similar urgent climate appeal, my encounters with them ultimately drove home the point that, in our local struggle against current ecological problems, Nigeria needs a workable mentoring method, and all relevant policy structures, that will enhance a bridge between old rugged wisdom and new teething knowledge.
Prince Lekan Fadina, a climate change, sustainable development and finance specialist, is a negotiator who has been representing Nigeria in these climate talks for more than a decade now. At Warsaw, it was easy to notice the elderly Nigerian dutifully walking from one meeting room to the other. Being a negotiator for finance, he was able to set the records straight concerning the paranoia that was prevalent at the end of the COP, especially concerning the Green Climate Fund which, because it has not been operationalised yet, was latched on by pessimists to give thumbs down to the whole process.
According to Fadina, instead of being a flop, the Fund is actually a work-in-progress. The timeline for the fund is 2020, and it is still seven years ahead. What is significant is that the Resource Mobilisation Process is on-going with the initial guidelines being put in place. The Fund now has its head offices hosted in South Korea and a Tunisian, Ms Héla Cheikhrouhou, is the Secretary. The Agreement between the Republic of Korea and the Green Climate Fund regarding the Headquarters of the Green Climate Fund was signed in Bonn, Germany, on 2 June 2013 and in Songdo, Incheon, Republic of Korea, on 10 June 2013. The agreement entered into force in accordance with paragraph 5 of Article 20 of the Agreement on 27 August 2013. The opening ceremony of the Fund’s headquarters took place on 4 December 2013 in Songdo. The Secretariat is a fully independent entity.
He said, “Climate change is knowledge based; as a country we need to get competent people to come into the process. For example loss and damage will affect our insurance companies. It is left for Nigeria to find out to what extent it will affect critical sectors in the country. The time has come for our judiciary, our legal system to look at the issue of climate change. This is because climate change has a lot of issues surrounding it, and a lot of issues are coming up and we have to get involved in all the sectors. For example, it has become an issue of gender, an issue of poverty alleviation and now an issue of ICT. Although some of the Nigerian banks have taken up sustainable banking principles, it goes beyond just sustainable banking principles. It has to be put at the centre of our development plans, be it Vision 20:2020, etc. This issue must be integrated in our developmental process.”
Hamzat Lawal is a young environmental activist who participated in COP 19 as Nigeria’s representative and Fellow in the Adopt a Negotiator project. He joined other representatives from Peru, India, Kenya, China, Fiji, New Zealand, Philippines, Ukraine, Brazil, Middle East, North Africa and Poland. The project is envisioned to directly involve young people in the climate change solutions because they are the ones who will live with the decisions being hashed out in meetings between country leaders. Representing 13 countries and nine different languages, Adopt a Negotiator trackers engage the process with the mission of changing the way citizens from around the world engage in shaping climate change solutions at global level. They make it open and understandable, and “bring a human element to a too soulless process.”
Because many Nigerian youths were denied entry visa into Poland, Hamzat became the face of Young Nigeria at COP 19. When the youths of the world gathered, it was consoling to see his face among them, underlining the fact that, in as much as the Nigerian youth delegation was frustrated, our light could not put out. From Warsaw, Hamzat wrote an open letter to President Goodluck Jonathan, where he appealed to the President to write his name in ‘climate gold’.
“The United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, has invited you to join other Heads of State in bringing climate change commitments to the Climate Change Summit in New York in September 2014. If you ascent to this bill (the Climate Change Commission Bill, passed by the National Assembly and pushed to the President’s table since December 2010) before going, you would put Nigeria on an enviable pathway toward building a low carbon economy; strengthening our resilience and bringing together the public and private sector, academia and other critical actors to chart a roadmap for sustainable growth and development for our great country, socially, economically and diplomatically with a guaranteed future for all,” he told Jonathan.
For the relatively few Nigerians who were privileged to participate in the negotiations and side events of the past UNFCCC COP 19 in Warsaw, there is one remarkable lesson to be learnt. The lesson is that there is now an urgent need to bridge the gap between the old and the new generation as a strategy for sustainable development. The Nigerian youth, in his helplessness, feels like a thirsty man in the wilderness who knows there is an oasis a few metres away but nobody is on hand to help him get to that life-saver. The youth’s problem is a bottled frustration of trying to survive alone without any survival kit or manual. From the Polish Embassy in Abuja to the meeting halls in Warsaw, this dilemma was palpable like the dark shadows of an abiding depression. In fact, as other nations’ delegates moved with their youths in tow, it stuck out like a diseased thumb in a healthy hand.
The Polish Embassy in Nigeria embarked on massive visa refusals to duly accredited civil society groups, of whom most were youth leaders and environmentalists, who applied for visas to attend the COP 19. The Embassy’s blanket reason as it denied over 100 visa applications was couched in the ambiguous phrase “…purpose of travel not justifiable…” despite the applicants providing authenticated UNFCCC accreditation letters, a return ticket, and hotel reservations. For anybody present at the Embassy in Abuja, the sight of Nigerian on the streets of Maitama as they waited for their visas was a sad one. It fed into the unspoken intention of the Embassy workers as reason for the massive visa rejection. The picture was that the youths were actually not travelling for the climate talks, but were on the lookout for greener pastures in foreign land and, therefore, would not return to Nigeria at the end of the COP.
But this is far from the truth. Nigeria, despite its many problems, is blessed with a steadily growing crop of young people whose only driving force is helping humanity and making their world a better place with no intention for material gains whatsoever. On that Niger Street, Maitama, were young environmentalists like Zaid Shopeju, Buni Ajilore and other established youth leaders. Shopeju is a climate change campaigner, advocate and sustainable development consultant with over four years of international, regional and national experiences with involvement in different UNFCCC climate talks from Bonn to Doha; recently nominated as a Global Peace Ambassador by the Africa Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes, Durban, South Africa, for his exemplary work on climate change and human rights issues. Ajilore was one of the scheduled key speakers at the Youth Session of the Global Landscapes Forum. With the right youth-friendly policy framework and mentoring culture in Nigeria, these youths and others like them will begin to contribute more to the future of this great nation, both at home and abroad.
By Greg Odogwu
Benefits of hugs
Have you had a hug today? Are you getting enough hugs? Psychotherapists say hugs can be very powerful, on an emotional, physical and mental level.
Dr. Kadiri says there are chemicals and hormones that are released into the blood stream whenever we have a good hug. They include Endorphins, Oxytocin, and Dopamine.
In a nutshell, hugging can improve your heart and prevent heart attack, cure depression, boost your libido to enjoy quality sex. As a matter of fact hugs has numerous health benefits for the overall well-being
As a huger, I wanted to examine how long a hug should last and how many hugs we require in a day.
Watch my report and give someone a hug today