The world needs to carve a pathway to limit global warming to 1.5°C, UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated in its latest report detailing the impact of climate change on the planet
The report said rising temperatures will push millions of people in Africa into poverty and hunger unless governments take swift action.
Apollos Nwafor, pan Africa director of Oxfam International, said, “Climate change has set our planet on fire, millions are already feeling the impacts, and the IPCC just showed that things can get much worse. Settling for 2° would be a death sentence for people in many parts of Africa. The faster governments embrace the renewable energy revolution and move to protect communities at risk, the more lives and livelihoods that will be spared.”
“A hotter Africa is a hungrier Africa. Today at only 1.1° of warming globally, crops and livestock across the region are being hit and hunger is rising, with poor small-scale women farmers, living in rural areas suffering the most. It only gets worse from here,” he added.
Nwafor went on to say that by simply following the commitments made in the Paris Agreement and doing nothing more will condemn the world to 3° of warming. He praised the developing countries on their fight against global warming and called on the developed countries to follow suit.
“While time is short, there is still a chance of keeping to 1.5° of warming. We must reject any false solution like Large Scale Land Based Investments that means kicking small-scale farmers off their land to make way for carbon farming and focus instead on stopping our use of fossil fuels, starting with an end to building new coal power stations worldwide,” the director concluded.
