The environmental risks affecting the Third World: negative economic trends or avoidable paradigms?
The African continent increasingly highlights numerous socio-economic intervention paradigms. But that’s not enough. Over the past 50 years, the global rate of natural disasters has increased by 125%. Drought in the Horn of Africa. Torrential rains in Somalia. Drought in Ethiopia. There are only a few of the environmental phenomena that contribute day by day to the destruction of local communities.
The non-profit organization Climate Policy Initiative estimates that Africa needs 277 billion dollars a year to implement adequate policies to achieve the climate objectives of the 2030 Agenda, but at the moment financial flows towards the continent on this front are limit to $30 billion annually. The commitment of 4.5 billion dollars of investments in African clean energy arrived yesterday from the United Arab Emirates: of these funds, a tenth, 450 million, will be carbon credits. In fact, it is a growing market that African governments are looking at with extreme interest, together with other financial instruments, to otherwise obtain those funds that struggle to arrive from donor countries.
But why is there so little talk about it? Africa is in fact a forgotten continent, except in cases where the current debate turns on migration issues, which drag with it the usual “Let’s help them at home”. But this is precisely where one of the greatest hypocrisies lies: no one talks about the climate change that continues to afflict these populations, resulting in natural disasters. According to a recent analysis by the New York Times, a fundamental problem in combating geothermal disasters is the lack of meteorological detection instruments. These are in fact often obsolete or totally missing, due to the inefficiency of investments in African territory.
However, if climate disasters are increasingly persistent, the condition of water scarcity affecting entire communities in Central Africa is even worse. Suffice it to say that temperatures in Africa continue, as throughout the world, to grow at rates never before recorded. But that is not all. The growth rate of African temperatures stands as the highest globally with 3 percentage points above the average. But there is a beacon of hope: Early Warnings for All. This is a global initiative that requires all terrestrial areas to be controlled and monitored by early warning systems by 2027.
On the initiative of the Secretary of the United Nations, Antonio Gutierres, with the broad agreement of multilateral development banks, humanitarian organizations and IT companies, the Early Warnings for All initiative aims to safeguard especially African countries, with the aim of preventing disruptions and the looming of further catastrophes. This trend is expected to continue. Adverse weather conditions and the effects of global warming will raise alarm around the world, but the main problem will continue to arise for countries forgotten by the world, but we can do even better, which is why the Early Warnings for all initiative is also a top priority for the WMO. In addition to avoiding damage, meteorological, climate and hydrological services are economically beneficial for agriculture, air, sea and land transport, energy, health, tourism and various commercial activities.
