|
Demystify environmental issues: Mlambo-Ngcuka
CAPE TOWN – It was essential to demystify environmental issues so that more ordinary people took up the cudgels for a green planet, Deputy President Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka said on Tuesday at the third assembly of the Global Environment Facility in Cape Town.
“We must do all that we can to show ordinary people, particularly the rural poor, have a role to play in ensuring that our environment is protected and to promote good practices when it comes to environmental issues,” she said at the opening plenary session of GEF.
The GEF is an independent entity based on a partnership with the UN Development Programme, the UN Environment Programme and the World Bank to help fund projects aimed at protecting the global environment.
Mlambo-Ngcuka said South Africa was also affected by the impact of global warming and climate change, with increasing temperatures affecting the wine and fruit industries of the Western Cape, as an example.
Mlambo-Ngcuka said a concerted drive should be undertaken to mobilise the youth around environmental issues, saying they had a critical role to play.
She said that the youth needed to view environmental issues, such as deforestation and climate changes, with the same intensity as when the older generation chanted the anti-apartheid slogan “victory or death”.
“Because it’s a survival issue,” she told delegates, adding that messages needed to be communicated simply.
“If you don’t protect your environment there will be no wine,” she said.
Mlambo-Ngcuka said it was important to balance and locate economic growth within a sustainable development framework.
So, when the country embarks on its massive housing programme to build new houses, it should be done with an eye on sustainable development.
“We must ensure we are not pound foolish and penny wise” when it came to questions of environmental sustainability, said Mlambo-Ngcuka.
She told delegates they should review whether the policies of GEF, a major financing mechanism for global environmental issues, were able to meet the growing scale of challenges facing the developing world, especially Africa.
Earlier, chief executive of GEF, Monique Barbut, said man-made pressures on ecosystems were having a disastrous effect.
“Each and every part of our planet is suffering the vagaries of nature,” she said, listing drought, desertification and their attendant socio-economic manifestations as some of these vagaries.
Barbut said it was vitally important to come up with solutions to poverty and sustainable development, and how the GEF’s “record-breaking” replenishment funds of US 3.13 billion would be spent.
She said the GEF worked in such focal areas as biodiversity, climate change, water security and land degradation.
Barbut stressed the role of the private sector to take a “broader and more concrete part” in the resolution of problems that were of a global nature. – Sapa.
|