When I was a child, a long drought drove my family from our rural village in Kenya to Kibera, the largest slum in the country. My single mother wanted to give us a better life, but with little prospects we ended up in the poorest part of Nairobi.
Climate change has shaped my life and taught me a lot about our environment. Even my name, Oded, means “after the drought”. I now run a globally recognized, community-based NGO across Kenya that undertakes projects to help people adapt to such changes. On the one hand, we have built an aerial water system in Kibera, which seems to be vulnerable to the increasingly common extreme floods that are accompanied by increasing drought and rain cycles.
in kenya the last catastrophic rainthose rains displaced more than 300,000 people nationwide, triggered a cholera outbreak, and further strained access to food and clean water. to destroy from climate related extreme weather events can last for decades. These disasters make community leaders first responders, developing solutions to fight for their future, but NGOs working in Africa often neglect to use local leaders’ deep understanding of the people in a community and their needs.
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We must be more than spectators, passive recipients of help for adaptation. Community leaders and local organizations should lead adaptation efforts. We, not the outside teams working in our communities, have the most knowledge about our local environment, and we have the most at stake.
we are living in a crucial moment. More than 110 million Africans 2022 was directly affected by climate-related risks, and according to forecasts, 700 million people will be displaced by 2030. due to climate change.
Historically, global climate priorities have focused solely on efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate global warming, but The IPCC, the United Nations’ program on climate change, has become increasingly vocal that climate change is already here, and that we cannot slow it down fast enough. This requires people to adapt to: warmer temperatures, more frequent or intense disasters, and less water, among other things. According to UN Secretary General António Guterres, we are living in a situation.adaptation emergency’ and ‘he must act like this’. 29th Conference of Parties The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP29), A major UN climate change conference will be held in Baku, Azerbaijan this month. And climate adaptation will be a hotly debated topic there. Developed countries will make financing commitments Adjustment Fundwhich aims to support locally driven adaptation and has previously fell short of its funding targets. The goals must be fully met this year to properly implement climate adaptation efforts at this precarious time
Africa lives 17 of the 20 countries most at risk of disruption due to climate-related risks, and where slum dwellers are vulnerable to extreme weather events more than 60 percent of the city’s population. Our communities have a disproportionate environmental impact compared to more developed nations, so mitigation has little impact at this point. Africa must adapt to remain livable by investing in solutions that will help us better prepare for the impacts of climate change. Otherwise, many more people will become climate refugees.
With the pipes suspended above, the water system created by the organization I lead, Shining Hope for Communities (SHOFCO), it provides the clean water essential for adaptation, and eliminates the risks of contaminated water by extracting it from an underground well. During the recent floods and outbreak of water-borne diseases, the system continued to provide clean water to residents of Kibera.
In Nairobi’s Mathare slum, young people have organized clean-ups of the Mathare River, planting trees on the barren, hardened clay banks to prepare for floods. Trees help prevent flooding by slowing the flow of heavy rain from the sky to the ground, reducing runoff and preventing erosion. Another group in Mathare has created roof gardens and installed rainwater harvesting systems to manage water without paying for it during droughts. They are planting trees such as avocado, mango and guava, which allow them to sell food and surplus products. Such initiatives are almost unknown in overcrowded slums around the world, where there is a lack of green space and urban waste removal. Young people see climate change as an immediate threat, and are using every resource at their disposal to make their communities more livable, now and in the future.
Yet despite such projects, community-based leadership is often overlooked by international policy makers who set the climate agenda and direct funds to adaptation projects. This is partly due to the dynamics of financing; funders are too far from the communities they want to reach, so they are unwilling to relinquish control of project agendas or invest in strengthening local leadership.
While local leaders may not have the scientific expertise to predict weather patterns, we have a unique ability to drive change; top-down approaches led by outside groups usually fail because many community members do not trust outsiders. They are more expensive and less durable in the long term. Local organizations can provide programming 32% more cost-effective than international teams, based on savings in wages and overheads. Trusted local leaders with cultural knowledge are best placed to understand people’s specific needs and engage community members at every turn.
In Zimbabwe a savings collective called the Gungano Urban Poor Fund provides loans for climate projects in poor urban communities. In Namibia, a government-funded small grant program called Empower to Adapt enabled dozens of community conservatories and community-managed forests to undertake projects to improve fire management, clean water supplies, access to solar energy, and more. Many other climate adaptation projects are taking place in rural Kenya, including the distribution of drought-resistant seeds and tree nurseries and the conversion of food waste into organic fertilizer through composting. A drought of the past three years has killed him 80 percent of the region’s cows In northern Kenya, the local Samburu tribe has started raising camels as a “drought-fighting” alternative, as they are able to withstand more extreme conditions.
Despite the success of these projects, climate adaptation has not yet received the level of attention and investment it deserves, especially in the most vulnerable parts of the world. This is in part due to a long-standing belief among some scientists and policymakers that a shift to adaptation signals to the public that the mitigation battle has been lost. They fear that people and governments will stop trying to promote renewable energy. So governments have not moved quickly enough to increase their adaptation targets. Globally, adaptation accounts for only 5 percent of all climate-related investments, andonly 20 percent of that goes to Africa— About 13,000 million dollars every year. A UN economist has estimated that by 2030, Africa will be $2.5 trillion short about the financing needed to adapt to climate change.
Despite the commitments made in the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals, there is a growing divide between international financing flows and local needs. Adaptation funding from both public and private sector sources has fallen by the wayside, and many African countries are struggling to access existing funding, relying on emergency response funding to address climate impacts. It’s not close enough. The longer you wait, the greater and more expensive your needs will be. International financiers must come to us, and trust us, because the next generation of climate leaders on the continent will be African. Give them what they need to survive, on the spot, at home.
This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author(s) are not necessarily their own. American scientific
