Conserving Africa’s biodiversity: the solution to climate change
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Loading... - Alice Uwimana
- 25 Apr 2023
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22% of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots are in Africa. This represents natural capital whose loss in economic and ecological terms is not easy to fathom.
These areas represent the last places to provide essential ecosystem goods and services necessary for current and future development and human well-being to which Africa now aspires.
There is even an influential and understandably appealing response to the global initiatives on climate change and biodiversity loss mitigation to the effect that conservation is a luxury that poor countries cannot afford, that they should be allowed to follow the course that today’s industrialized countries followed, namely: “develop first and clean up later.”
The evidence of the effects of the industrial age on the climate and nature is becoming more compelling, our job now is persuading more and more people that extractive economic growth is reaching its ecological limits. We are all uniquely positioned and qualified to help articulate, describe, and advise on a vision for the future of humanity in which nature coexists with modern cities, productive farmlands, greater expanded infrastructure and even manufacturing.
Otherwise, how do you explain the lack of understanding of the connection with – investment in hydro energy with no attention to where water comes from, or billions for the agriculture sector without attention to rainfall that comes from forests? For example, among the 1.5 million people of Mombasa, Kenya, how many know that half of their domestic water is from Tsavo national park?
What we have failed to unlearn is that Natural Resource Management and conservation are not only for the so-called tree huggers. These are shared resources that are meant to last past our lifetime and for generations to come. Read More…
