Government says it is in the process of integrating climate change adaptation into development planning in order to help communities mitigate the effects of climate change.
BY SHARON SIBINDI
Speaking on the sidelines of a green procurement experts training workshop in Kadoma on Thursday, Local Government principal administrator, Annah Takaendesa said her ministry was incorporating climate change into the development of sector-specific policies to ensure the country is more prepared to deal with the effects of climate change.
The workshop was organised by the government in collaboration with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), supported by Russia Trust Fund.
Takaendesa said the government, working with UNDP and Unicef, had already initiated a programme aimed at building urban resilience which is being piloted in Chipinge, Gwanda and Harare. She said the programme, benefiting youths, women and the vulnerable, was born out of the realisation that most local authorities were failing to adapt and mitigate the effects of climate change due to lack of funding.
“So, if we are to empower the residents, the local authority will inadvertently benefit,” Takaendesa said.
“The Ministry of Local Government and Public Works is in the process of mainstreaming the climate change agenda into developmental planning.
“This programme will strengthen the resilience of cities in dealing with shocks and stressors emanating from anthropogenic or climate change.”
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Meanwhile, climate change mitigation expert Lawrence Mashungu said the country was on the right path in the process of coming up with a climate change national adaptation plan. “So as the climate change department, our role is to promote and co-ordinate, especially formulating the policy framework for climate change,” Mashungu said. “Currently, we have developed the low emission strategy, we are also in the process of coming up with a national adaptation plan.
“We already have the national climate policy and the national determined contributions and those are the policies.”
He added: “But now the most important thing is the mitigation and adaptation actions. They are there especially in the responsible ministries and sectors. For the past four weeks we have been doing capacity building programmes with different ministries like Agriculture, Energy, and Industry.”
“They are currently also coming up with the energy efficiency policy and these are mitigation actions that we talked about. The Ministry of Energy has also come up with the statutory instrument that bans all the incandescent bulbs and we are now supposed to use LED lights,” he said.
