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Opinion: Climate Change Demands Fresh Thinking

Ambassador Macharia Kamau, the UN Special Envoy on El Nino's, thoughts, as captured in an article published elsewhere in this edition, resonate with our previous editorials where we stressed the need for responsive, dynamic thinking around climate change in the country. The ambassador says the country has a strong and proud history of using its reserves to build up resilience to extreme weather events, including droughts and flooding. In fact, since the diamond miracle, few are the times when Botswana has required external assistance to cope with droughts and other natural disasters occurring on a national scale.

However, as Kamau notes, those days are gone and with declining mineral revenues and the certainty of even more extreme weather events going forward, the policy of using its reserves to cope will not work for Botswana. Climate change has long been knocking on Botswana’s doors, but decision-makers rather than responding effectively, have been running helter-skelter, tripping over various overlapping policies and ignoring the increasingly loud bangs on the door. Even after the El Nino-driven droughts of 2014/15 and 2015/16 and even after witnessing the first drying up of the Gaborone Dam and complete water outages in the capital, the official climate change policy is yet to see the inside of the National Assembly. At central government level, both the ministries of environment and agriculture are either not talking or listening to each other, as one preaches drought resistant crops

Tom Doyle

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