Climate change activist Prosper Matondi believes Zimbabwe is taking a proactive role in implementing measures to lessen the impact of climate change.
Matondi (PM), who is also an agricultural expert, told Farai Makutuya (FM) on the platform In Conversation With Trevor that the country started rolling out climate change mitigation strategies as early as the 1980s.
Below are excerpts from the interview.
FM: Prosper Matondi, my guest today, let us begin, I suppose, by way of introduction with you very briefly telling us who you are and how you ended up doing the things that you do, that you are so passionate about?
PM: Well, thank you, Farai, or probably I should say the new ‘Trevor’ for In Conversation With Trevor.
I am glad to be on this show to share with you various aspects of my life and also my work around rural development that touches a number of areas.
Be it climate change, be it renewable energy, be it social protection, working with vulnerable communities, refugees or even living with refugees to understand them better in terms of their life.
I have worked at a higher level with government, within the private sector and with the development partners on a range of issues that include climate, agriculture, food security and so on.
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More importantly, I have also worked with young people.
I have tried by all means to develop young people in terms of education, but also in terms of having them doing plough-back in their communities where they come from.
So you would see that the range of students that I have supervised or mentored, range from those with no degrees at all to those with Masters and PhDs.
I cannot even count the number of students that I have had now, but it is an area that really does excite me to help young people in order to move the country and society forward.
Those range of issues are something that probably I will share in this session for the benefit of your viewers.
FM: I want to start with something that is very topical at a global level, and something that you have taken to social media about, something you have been very vocal about and that is the issue of climate change.
Do you think as a nation we are taking this challenge seriously enough?
PM: I think we have to be very historical in terms of our role and our engagement with climate change.
Zimbabwe was probably one of the countries in the world to have taken climate change seriously.
I go back to the 1980s for instance, where we had the only university then, the University of Zimbabwe, having a climatology course that it ran for a number of years.
I am not sure whether the university is still doing that, but I think at a national level we do, in terms of policies, in terms of planning strategies, we do have a quite good engagement on that.
The key matter that arises is in relation to the actual actions that we need to be undertaking, but action you know, comes not just with responsibility, but also comes with resources.
The resources for climate change probably are not adequate for us to make headway in terms of what we can do better.
However, I think the message is out there for the government, for the national climate policy, a climate strategy, a communication strategy and all of that in place.
The question is: How is that being translated to real action to address climate-related issues?
This is because we do have a global responsibility, a shared responsibility, all of us.
Be it smaller farmers, be it people in urban set-ups, and also at a global level.
So you have those key markers at the global level that one needs to look at in terms of climate change and also our responsibility towards meeting that collective.
I think I always say to people, small is beautiful, we grew in that era of small is beautiful. But I am beginning to say that we have a shared responsibility for the larger global good, it also has to be beautiful and we have got a shared responsibility to address climate change.
FM: How do we fit in that? We are a very small country in the global context.
I want to take you here to a debate that is always raging, whereas developing nations are being perhaps called on to sign up to treaties and declarations and conform to standards that are being set by already developed countries, who perhaps did the same things that we want to do in order to get to where they are.
Carbon emissions, for instance, not using coal and looking for cleaner energy.
Where do we fit in and is it fair for us to have to conform to those standards?
PM: I think that is a very controversial and probably an issue that really touches on the soul of what we need to be doing as developing countries and also as Zimbabwe as part of that global collective.
We are not being called upon to, but we have to be part of the agenda somehow.
To be part of the agenda means engaging with good science, with good knowledge, good information and good data to be able to do so.
So, I do not think that we are being called not to develop our country, because in terms of carbon emissions everyone has some responsibility, but some have got a far greater responsibility than others.
For us, it is a question of how we mobilise our society and communities, and be able to cut on carbon emissions.
Let us just look at Zimbabwe, just Zimbabwe itself in terms of its emissions.
Much of it comes from energy, 49% of it comes from fossil fuels that we use for energy and so on.
The second largest emitter is agriculture with probably around 36% if I am correct.
So you have got your industry, manufacturing, for instance, it is just contributing about 5% of today’s emissions.
Waste contributes about 6%, so we have got a situation where industry is actually a very low emitter.
That means that there is probably much more leeway to move with it, when we look then for alternatives, be it in terms of renewable energy, solar energy, and other alternatives, there is a huge gap that we can fill.
The question is: What is needed to be able to reorient our industry towards meeting the targets?
Not just of climate change and carbon reduction, but also of growing industry so that we are able to provide goods and services to our population.
I think that is where the crux of the matter is, and for us there is leeway for moving forward.
We also have to look at the global agreements.
How do we socialise some of the global agreements around the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), as well as the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, in terms of the science around it?
How do we get adequate data that we can use for informing policy and change?
These are fundamental issues and we are in agreement with the global community, that is why Zimbabwe is a party to the UNFCC.
However, at the same time we also participate in all the Conference of Parties (meetings).
I cannot remember from when, but the significant one was the Paris Accord of 2015.
We heavily participated in it, and we still do the other Conference of Parties as well, because we have that global responsibility for cutting on emissions but also for changing people’s livelihoods through interventions around adaptation and mitigation.
FM: Translating our obligations that are global, at a national level to actually then the grassroots.
So taking it down to the community level to make sure that the smallholder farmer in that community wherever it is in that rural community is doing what they need to do and are aware that they also have to act?
PM: In spite of our agricultural interventions, especially agriculture extension and to enhance agriculture productivity, mainstreaming in climate change is quite fundamental, but you have to look at the whole gamut of problems related to climate change that look especially in terms of agriculture production, food security, and our water management, soils management and all of those factors of production that are key of operating the system.
We are different because our smallholder production is essentially based on rainfall, but the Lord has been very unkind, we had more years of rainfall deficits than plenty.
In the last decade, for instance, I would say that 2016-2017 was a good year, and also this current season where we are expecting probably about 2.8 million tonnes of maize.
That is recordbreaking since 1980 we have gone to those big numbers, but the main factor is not because of any of the interventions we have made. It is simply because we have had a very good rainfall season. However, let me tell you that in the next five to 10 years we might not have that rainfall.
You look at the expectation. According to the IPCC Report it is that for Zimbabwe we expect rainfall to decrease by about 4.1% by 2030, and within the scale of around 5.6% by 2070. So in other words we are going to have more times when we have got rainfall deficit.
So how do we prepare for that? How do we make society reorient towards that?
Knowing very well that our irrigation is very low.
We are talking about 275 000 hectares of irrigated land, and for the very first time this year and in terms of our targets for wheat, we are probably around 200 000 that has been targeted.
That’s quite significant, but very small in relation to our capacity, which can go all the way to about a million hectares under irrigation.
So as long as we do not have control of water, control of water resources there is no way we can better fight climate change and its effects on rural communities, and increasing the areas under irrigation for smallholder farmers is fundamental.
However this is a cost, it has got a huge cost that ordinary farmers cannot meet.
So what do we do in terms of precise interventions that we need to do not to deal with climate change at household level?
