Livelihoods, Climate Adaptation and Mitigation by Gulugulu & Abimbola
Climate change had a significant negative impact on the livelihoods and food security status of smallholder farmers. In essence, adaptation can be understood as the process of adjusting to the current and future effects of climate change. Mitigation means making the impacts of climate change less severe by preventing or reducing the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) into the atmosphere.
People are experiencing both the subtle and dark effects of climate change. Gradually shifting weather patterns, rising sea levels and more extreme weather events are devastating evidence of both a rapidly changing climate and an urgent need for solutions.
The impacts of climate change affect every country on the continent but they don’t feel the impact in the same way. People already burdened by poverty and oppression often suffer the hardest consequences, while having the least ability to cope. Their struggle to earn a living, feed their families and create stable homes is made more difficult every day as the climate crisis continues.
The increased frequency and intensity of extreme weather events like hurricanes, wildfires and droughts threaten lives in these front-line communities, driving people from their homes and jeopardizing food sources and livelihoods. All these effects increase the likelihood of more conflict, hunger and poverty.
About 1.4 billion people around the world rely on traditional fuels like coal and wood to meet their basic energy needs.
Revamp Rave Network held the 9th session of the Second Virtual cohort training programme on climate change on “Livelihood, Climate Change Mitigation And Adaptation” on the 2nd of July 2022. The session was taught by Elizabeth Gulugulu — Programme Manager of African Youth Initiative on Climate Change Zimbabwe and Abimbola Abikoye –Founder of Revamp Rave Network Initiative.
Elizabeth Gulugulu defined livelihoods as what allows people to secure the basic necessities of life such as food, shelter and clothing, while mitigation can reduce emissions of and stabilise the levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere which includes enhancing the sink that accumulates and stores these gases such as oceans, forests and soil and some goals of mitigation includes to ensure that food production is not threatened, to enable economic development to proceed in a sustainable manner, to avoid significant human interference with the climate systems and stabilize greenhouse gas levels in a timeframe sufficient to allow ecosystems to adapt naturally to climate change.
Different companies both private companies and organizations have started implementing solar plants which are helping greatly in reducing the emission of gases, and in countries like Zimbabwe and Nigeria, we import solar panels which during transport emit gases and that is a problem. In term of livelihood young people can look and study ways to produce and install solar panels in this part of the word which will generate income and also help save a climate change crisis.
Hydropower, she said, is energy gotten from water, where turbans are placed in dams and it produce energy. In the same way Biogas digester uses biodegradable material to produce energy like the use of human waste after degradation can be used to produce energy and also conversion of waste like plastics to make roofing. Good agriculture practice can also help reduce emissions of greenhouse gases like how we plant our seeds and some chemicals we use.
Climate Adaptation is taking appropriate action to minimize the damage, and we need adaptation strategies at all levels of administration such as the local, regional, national and international levels and some agricultural practices include ensuring food security, crop diversification.
On one hand successfully adapting to change, society’s leaders need to make decisions that reduce potential damage and take advantage of new opportunities. However, most of the decisions and policymakers don’t have the information they need to make the necessary changes.
On the other, lack of appropriate decision support tools to present information on a cost-loss level, which would enable them to explicitly include adaptation actions in the city and state budgets.
Abimbola mentioned that climate actions have often fallen into one of two strategies including mitigation efforts to lower or remove greenhouse gas emissions from the atmosphere, and adaptation efforts to adjust systems and societies to withstand the impacts of climate change. The separation has led to the misinformed view that addressing climate change means pursuing either mitigation or adaptation, and strong decreases in greenhouse gas emissions are required to meet the reduction trajectory resolved within the 2015 Paris Agreement. Also, the predominantly poor people of the rural areas lack the capacities and resources to meet these challenges, or to develop adaptation measures and secure their livelihoods.
There are the five prominent impacts of climate change including ocean acidification causing coral reefs and loss of sea animals, sea-level rise causing flooding, intensification of storms, shifts in species distribution, and decreased productivity and oxygen availability, as well as their cumulative effects.
She explained that climate change adaptation is adjusting to the current or expected effects of climate change. It also refers to actions that reduce the negative impact of climate change while taking advantage of potential new opportunities and adaptation strategies are mainly shaped by psychological perceptions about the change and its impacts.
The fourth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) states that while neither adaptation nor mitigation actions alone can prevent significant climate change impacts, taken together they can significantly reduce risks. Mitigation is necessary to reduce the rate and magnitude of climate change, while adaptation is essential to reduce the damages from climate change that cannot be avoided.
She pointed out that the ocean’s potential to mitigate climate change is also often overlooked. Protecting and restoring ocean habitats such as seagrasses, salt marshes and mangroves, as well as their associated food webs, can sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at rates up to four times higher than terrestrial forests can.
She concluded by stating that we need to build on indigenous practices and knowledge to enhance both Adaptation and Mitigation processes.
