02 October 2009
The UK government is stepping up its support for Malawi’s climate change efforts, with a new £1 million initiative.
Three UK government bodies already active in the country – the Department for International Development, the British High Commission and the British Council – are coming together to back a UK Action Plan on Climate Change in Malawi.
The plan will scale up existing UK-backed work on climate change and provide funding of £1 million over two years.
Climate change is a critical issue for Malawi. Already one of the poorest countries in the world, it has suffered from successive floods and droughts in recent years and is likely to experience more extreme and variable weather patterns in future.
A recent statement from Malawi’s Department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services forecast floods and dry spells in some parts of the country due to El Nino, a condition associated with below normal rainfall over Southern Africa and above normal rainfall in Eastern Africa.
The initiative comes as international government representatives gather in Bangkok for the penultimate round of negotiations before December’s Copenhagen summit.
That event will negotiate a successor treaty to the Kyoto protocol on greenhouse gas emissions and will discuss funding and other measures to speed up adaptation to climate change in developing countries such as Malawi.
Adaptation to climate change is crucial to tackling poverty in Malawi and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa. The country is highly dependent on agriculture – some 85 per cent of the population lives in the rural areas – and there is virtually no irrigation: 90 per cent of agriculture is rain-fed.
A recent report by the International Food Policy Research Institute concluded that, on present patterns, the number of malnourished children in sub-Saharan Africa will jump from 33 million in 2000 to 52 million in 2050, with more than half of the increase caused by climate change.
The UK action plan, unveiled late last month (September) will focus on five key areas: supporting the Malawi government’s implementation of its new national climate change management initiative; supporting development than can cope with climate change; raising the profile of climate change in Malawi both locally and internationally; maximizing the benefits of low-carbon development; and being ‘climate-smart’ in the way UK programmes work in Malawi.
Relative to other countries, there is low awareness of climate change in Malawi but the UK hopes its action plan will help change that.
Nearly half of the local participants at last month’s World Wide Views on Global Warming day – held in 46 locations worldwide - said they knew “little” or “nothing” about climate change and its consequences before the event.
More than 90 per cent of those participants said afterwards that they were “very concerned” about climate change, that a deal urgently needed to be reached at Copenhagen and that their country should join it.
A similar proportion also believed a global financial system should be set up to generate funds for mitigation and adaptation efforts in developing countries.
Working with the government of Malawi, DFID has helped to:
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Malawi is highly dependent on agriculture and 90 per cent of it is rain-fed.