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06/21/2005:

"Global warming in Africa: The hottest issue of all"

Bob Geldof, take note. All the rich nations' efforts to alleviate poverty in Africa will fail unless climate change can be checked, a coalition of British aid agencies and environment groups warns today.

More favourable arrangements for African debt relief, aid and trade - the point of the rock star's forthcoming Live8 concerts and items on the agenda for the Gleneagles G8 summit - will count for nothing unless the effects of global warming are countered, say the development and green groups in a hard-hitting new report.

To combat climate change, rich countries must cut their greenhouse gas emissions further, far beyond the targets laid down in the Kyoto Protocol, they say. But more than that, aid policy for Africa as a whole needs a complete rethink in climate change terms, because the continent is uniquely vulnerable to climatic shifts, with 70 per cent of its people being immediately dependent on rain-fed, small-scale agriculture.

Aid needs to be targeted in a new way, they insist, and what will be vital in the future will not be big development projects, such as industrial-scale agriculture, so much as steps to make small communities more resilient in the face of potentially devastating rises in temperature or drops in rainfall.
Full: indepemdent.co.uk