Category: Environment & Climate Change

Environmental changes

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My Future, My Environment Campaign

Thank you to all who contributed to making this a success. The competition is now closed.

Our planet continues to suffer the effects of human activity, including land degradation, air pollution and contamination of waters. For the most part due to human activities, the waters have been turned into places of dumping toxins, and arid lands sites for testing and deserting warfare equipment. The wild animals have become a means of quick riches as they are killed for their valuable body parts. The polluted air that we breathe has become the cause of our premature slow deaths. The list is endless. The ability of our natural resources to replenish themselves is being strained by the consumption of the high and rapidly increasing human population.

Yet, mankind remain ignorant, even adamant because of the values we grew up with; values that are no longer sustainable if we are to continue existing in this planet as we know it.

That is why we need environmental education to be a basic subject, not to be taught just formally like mathematics and history, but to be a way of life for the young generation; the leaders of tomorrow.

Environmental Education, as defined in the UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) Tbilisi Declaration (1978) is a learning process that increases people’s knowledge and awareness about the environment and associated challenges, develops the necessary skills and expertise to address the challenges, and fosters attitudes, motivations, and commitments to make informed decisions and take responsible action.

With just as much right to live in comfort utilizing the resources that nature gives unto them, children and youth do not have the option of spending these resources as freely as their predecessors. Their knowledge, attitude and practices have to be focussed on sustainable development and social individual and shared responsibility for the general good of their natural capital. It is their only hope for a future as good as their present life, and can make it even better.

The focus of Africa Environment’s My Future, My Environment educational campaign is mainly on:

  • Disseminating information and imparting knowledge and understanding about the environmental systems and environmental challenges to children and youth.
  • Encouraging and promoting self-learning on environmental aspects through research amongst children and youth.
  • Influencing change of attitude and concern for the environment from a tender age so as to ultimately bring up an environmental conscious generation of mankind.
  • Imparting skills to mitigate the environmental problems through encouraging participation in exercising acquired knowledge.

The core intent of this educational campaign is to foster this necessary change in the lifestyles of the upcoming generation. Their future surely depends on their environment. Our approach is in full recognition that Education is not enough by itself but is a tool which has to be combined with skills and experience to cause any desired change. Change we shall bring.

 

 

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Olonde Omondi – Dead River

Olonde Omondi

Title: Dead River
Medium: Acrylic on Paper
Size: A4
Price: USD 900

This image makes words about the environment in Kenya, or Africa as a whole, redundant.

So no words are here, other than those about the artist:

Omondi was born March of 1976 in Nyanza Province in the Western region of Kenya. The abundant black cotton soils of the area provided the basic material for his first form of expression as a child. In Nursery  School, this immediately translated itself into a love of drawing that still dominates him to date.

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AFRICA: Going rural and green

Farming needs to make money to drive growth

ADDIS ABABA, 15 October 2010 (IRIN) – As rural Africa experiences an increasingly moody climate which will erode resilience, drive up hunger and threaten economic growth, it is time countries got serious about development, participants at the seventh African Development Forum in Addis Ababa were told.

Africa’s Rural Futures (RF) programme, an initiative of the African Union’s New Partnership for Development (NEPAD) and the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), sets out plans to boost rural development, and is an attempt to adapt to the impact of climate change.

At the same time, organizations such as the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Bank are backing the UN’s Green Economy Initiative, which is more focused on mitigation.

In his address, Ibrahim Assane Mayaki, NEPAD’s chief executive officer, called RF a “new way of thinking about development”.

But is it new? At a policy level, Lindiwe Sibanda, head of the Food Agriculture and Natural Resources Policy Analysis Network, a think-tank, explained: “Well, what they are talking about is integrated rural development with agriculture as the driver. It will get all the ministries to look at their sectors with a rural lens. It moves beyond the sectoral approach.”

This would do agriculture in Africa some good, she hoped. “Development of agriculture has suffered because of the sectoral approach.” Departments of transport, infrastructure and agriculture have not worked in consort in many countries, affecting food production and supply.

In a bid to revive their failing rural economies, some developed  countries have been running RF programmes for some years. WWF, which has been involved in some of these programmes, had been looking at an initiative to improve rural livelihoods with a link to improving biodiversity in Africa, when they found NEPAD.

Urbanization

African countries need to bring their own money to the table – then only will they be able  to decide what development path or programmes they want to implement

The RF programme is guided by the fact that 60 percent of the population in Africa is rural, though UN projections indicate that the number of urban dwellers is likely to treble over the next four decades.

“Urbanization is a part of the natural evolution of a society, but what conditions will these new urban dwellers live in – slums?” asked Estherine Lesinge-Fotabong, NEPAD’s programme implantation head.

By providing new impetus to agriculture, the RF programme also hopes to create jobs, absorb the growing population, and tackle food security and gender empowerment. Most subsistence farmers in Africa are women.

Fine-tuning

RF was launched at the Forum, but is still being fine-tuned and is currently at a “strategic document stage”. It envisages a two-year period of consultation with countries and civil society across Africa.

RF talks about developing linkages between local and regional markets, but stops short of any connections to industry. “That is its shortcoming, but the programme is still evolving,” said Mersie Ejigu, head of the Partnership for African Environmental Sustainability, an international NGO.

Ejigu, a development economist and former minister of development and planning in the Ethiopian cabinet, added: “I am not saying we need to have big investments in massive agro-based industries. It could be small-scale, home-based industries but when you are looking beyond agriculture and adding value, you have to look at processing the primary product.”

Donor-dependent

Read more
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Hunger knows no borders
Farmers need a finanical umbrella
Food crisis in-depth

But money, and especially donors, decide the future of any programme in Africa, said Mamadou Cissokho, honorary president of the Network of West African Farmer and Producer Organizations. “African countries need to bring their own money to the table – then only will they be able to decide what development path or programmes they want to implement.”

This concern was also voiced by WWF’s Gabriella Richardson-Temm: “We are happy with the way this is shaping up and that Africa wants to design their own programme – but then donors, who bring in the funds, come with their own sets of conditions.”

RF could also be one of the components of the UN’s Green Economy Initiative, which is assisting governments to “green” their economies by reshaping policies to ensure growth on the basis of non-fossil fuel-based energy, backed by sustainable agriculture (with the help of investments in clean technology and public transport that runs on renewable energy). It also focuses on greening other sectors such as waste management and water services.

“You don’t want us to grow,” said a participant when UNEP’s Achim Steiner spelt out the initiative. Coal is still the cheapest source of energy in developing countries. Another said: “But Africa is already green – most of our people use biomass to produce energy.”

But you need money to access these alternative green technologies, pointed out Moussa Ould Hwedna, a technical adviser to Mauritania’s Ministry of Water and Sanitation. “Ours is a dry country and we need solar power to pump water from underground and the cost of solar energy is prohibitive.”

“We would like to adopt these technologies but developed countries should look at making it cheaper for us,” he added.

This is one of the issues at the UN climate change talks, the next round of which will take place in Mexico later this year.

jk/cb      Source: IRIN

Theme(s): Economy, Environment, Food Security, Gender Issues, Governance, Migration, Natural Disasters, Aid Policy, Urban Risk, Water & Sanitation,

[This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

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Sawdust with Brains

The Kisangani Smith Group has developed two types of efficient biomass stoves, which can be fabricated by local smiths. One stove is targeted at charcoal and replaces the widespread use of charcoal in towns. This stove burns sawdust, which is readily available as waste in the Njombe region of Tanzania, or agricultural residues. The other stove is an improved woodburner, designed for rural areas. The Kisangani Smith Group and its trainees have sold over 3,500 stoves so far.
Here’s their video: