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Prosper Ndlovu, Business Editor

GOVERNMENT has begun the process of drafting a Climate Change Bill to provide a supportive legal framework that enhances stakeholder collaboration in mainstreaming climate change mitigation and adaptation at all levels of development in the country.

Establishing a climate change legal framework is critical towards consolidating broader implementation aspects and ensuring that project interventions are in line with the country’s economic blue-print, the National Development Strategy (NDS1:2021-2025) and Vision 2030 ideals.

This comes at a time climate change is being mainstreamed in sub-national planning and budgetary processes.

The Treasury has explicitly called on all ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) to mainstream climate change in their 2022 budget submission for the first time in history.

Deputy Minister of Environment, Climate, Tourism and Hospitality Industry, Barbara Rwodzi, on Friday told senior Government officials who attended the Climate Change Mainstreaming Sensitisation Meeting for Provincial Development Secretaries that more collaboration was needed to build solid climate change mitigation and resilience capacity along the lines of devolution. 

“This will facilitate enhancing adaptive capacity and building the necessary resilience to climate change towards attainment of Zimbabwe’s own national development priorities and the global Sustainable Development Goals,” she said.

“As the ministry we are working on a climate change legal framework that will offer the country an opportunity to consolidate aspects of a climate change response including United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its Paris Agreement reporting requirements that cannot or might inadequately be covered by amending existing Statutory Instruments plus enacting additional regulations,” said the deputy minister.

Climate change scientist within the Department of Climate Change, Ms Emily Matingo, said the process of developing the new Bill was already underway and that its completion would enhance climate change adaptation compliance and ensure effective outcomes.

“This will buttress all the climate change intervention activities. We already have support pledged by Comesa and the Bill will be tabled before Parliament for further input,” she said.

As part of building adaptation momentum, Deputy Minister Rwodzi said all development planning should, going forward, have adaptation components at sub-national levels. 

“This is particularly important at such a time the devolution agenda has gained momentum,” she said. 

“I would like to invite you to actively contribute on how we may collectively advance the mainstreaming of climate change in development planning including budgetary processes so that we can be prepared and be proactive to the unprecedented impacts of climate change even as Tropical Depression Ana is threatening our backyards.”

She explained that henceforth, the Government’s position was that future budgets will continue to support climate adaptation approaches, which enable the country to mainstream climate change across all sectors.

Climate change has become a global issue and its impacts cannot be overemphasised. 

This is being evidenced by the reduction and increased variability in rainfall activity across the country, heatwaves, prolonged mid-season dry spells and an increase in intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as tropical cyclones and floods over the past years. 

Climate change adaptation initiatives are more critical for Zimbabwe where livelihoods of its rural communities are highly vulnerable to climate change due to their over reliance on rain-fed agriculture, said Deputy Minister Rwodzi.

“With the rainfall seasons increasingly becoming variable and uncertain, it threatens livelihoods and economic performance across the country and the situation is worsened by the correlation between rainfall and Gross Domestic Product (GDP) performance,” she said. 

“As a country, we are therefore faced with the task of enhancing preparedness and ensuring that our socio-economic sectors are climate-proofed to withstand and cope with the impacts of climate change and the only way to ensure this happens is mainstreaming climate change in developmental planning and budgetary processes.”

At national level, the Government has responded to the urgent need for climate action by strengthening and facilitating an enabling environment for climate change programming in the country.

With support from the Green Climate Fund and UNEP, the Government has recently been rolling out a country wide district engagement programme where concerted effort is being made in the discussions to jumps-tart climate change mainstreaming in planning and budgetary processes.

Meanwhile, Zimbabwe has standing commitments on greenhouse gas emissions reduction to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and its Paris Agreement through the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). 

“This calls for an urgent need to ensure that our national and sectoral policies speak to clean development, green growth, and climate resilience,” said Deputy Minister Rwodzi. 

In September 2021, Cabinet approved Zimbabwe’s revised NDC to the UNFCCC, which commits to a 40 percent per capita emissions reduction target by 2030. 

In addition, the revised NDC makes adaptation commitments through enhanced early warnings and disaster risk reduction, climate smart agriculture, climate resilient infrastructure development and resilient and sustainable water resources management.  

Under NDS1, Zimbabwe has integrated climate change as a key thematic area on “Environmental Protection, Climate Resilience and Natural Resources Management” and goes further to set a sector outcome of “Improved Climate Action”. 

In the same vein the country is also required to promote and facilitate various education, training and awareness programmes at all levels hence the mainstreaming of climate change into the education curriculum.