Zimbabwe is one of the victim countries of climate change, as global temperatures rise the country will become drier and droughts will be more frequent.One of the major sources of drought in our region is the El Nino phenomenon, caused by the oscillation of warming waters in the central Pacific Ocean and in a warmer world those will be faster. So as President Mugabe clearly stated at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Morocco this week, Zimbabwe is committed to play its part in implementing the Paris Agreement to limit these undesirable changes.
In fact, the President was clear that Zimbabwe wanted to cut carbon emissions by 33 percent by 2050.
But the burden of implementation has to be shared. Developing countries, in particular, have to be given the right and opportunity to develop and grow their economies, while at the same time reducing their carbon footprint.
This is possible, but it will require technology transfers and financing arrangements that can be good business as well as good for the planet. Some home-grown efforts, originally put in place to improve economic fundamentals, also mitigate carbon emissions. One such is the Lowveld plant converting sugarcane to ethanol to ensure that our fuel imports are lowered.
At the same time it provides a market for Zimbabwean farmers and industrial jobs. More can be done, but this will require investment. Ethanol generates carbon dioxide when burnt, but an equivalent amount is absorbed from the atmosphere by the new crop. Even the processing uses electricity generated from cane waste, so the carbon footprint of Zimbabwe’s ethanol industry is minuscule.
Zimbabwe and Zambia are keen to start work on the long-planned Batoka Gorge hydro-electric scheme as soon as possible. This will generate a lot of electricity with no carbon emissions. But it will cost more than a couple of equivalent coal-fired power stations.
Solar power is an obvious renewable energy source in Zimbabwe although it will not be really useful until storage technologies, now under intense research, are readily available.
But these alternatives to coal, hydro and solar, will require high capital inflows. Zimbabwe does not keep spare billions of dollars stacked in safes. In many cases it will be easy to pay off the capital, either through paying off a rationally-priced loan or through a build and operate scheme that reverts to Zimbabwe after a fixed fair number of years.
Hydro and solar demand significantly higher investments to build over a coal station, but once built their fuel is free, water in a river and the sun shining down. The only running costs are maintenance and control costs, a small fraction of a coal station’s running costs.
So there will be income over the decades to pay off a rational loan. Someone has to make those development loans and someone has to transfer technology at a fair price. We do not need gifts, but we do need a fair and sensible financial system.
What President Mugabe was pressing for in Morocco was for the promises implicit in the Paris Agreement to be made explicit and to be implemented fairly and equitably. The whole world will benefit immensely if climate change is arrested. But doing so requires universal commitment and a new way of regarding the planet.
Fighting climate change must not be an excuse to increase protectionism, to deny development to vast swathes of the world and its people. It must be seen as the opposite, as a way of boosting everyone’s living standards while reducing or eliminating the damage from development.
It is possible. It just needs universal political will.