‘Ignoring climate change now will prove costly in future’

If the world does not respond appropriately to climate change now, the cost of dealing with the catastrophes to emerge from the phenomenon will be three-to four and five times more, Kinsgley Ofei-Nkansah, General Secretary of the General Agricultural Workers’ Union (GAWU) of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) has remarked.

He spoke exclusively to B&FT at the sidelines of a conference on the National Climate Change Policy which was launched by President John Mahama, held in Accra and sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung (Foundation) in collaboration with GAWU of TUC last week Thursday.

Therefore, the main reason for organising the conference, he said, is to bring general awareness to the citizens of Ghana and general stakeholders since the global challenge is clear.

“Climate change is happening faster than was predicted according to scientific evidence released early in the year by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Again, it is becoming clearer that the impact is more grave than anticipated,” he stated in the interview.

This is why at the recent UN summit on climate change in October in New York, people all over the world were beginning to make big demands from world leaders since they deem that the responses from them and other stakeholders in the challenge are woefully inadequate.

To reduce greenhouse gasses, he noted, there is a need to shift away carbon-based energy resources of coal, oil and natural gas, as well as address the problem of deforestation. He also said there is need to mobilise billions of dollars to deal with mitigation, being the reduction of greenhouse emissions.

Agriculture, he said, is already recording lower yields -- and this indicates the ravages of climate change are already visible, hence there is a need to find ways to build resilience by reducing vulnerabilities to the challenge.

For both mitigation and adaptation, there is a need to find more financial resources than so far pledged since there is a huge gap between what has been promised and what is delivered, he added. What has been promised is in itself inadequate; thus world leaders should take a serious view to the challenge because, as of now, there is no binding legal convention or regime to compel individual countries to live up to expectations.

He said they are looking at the possibility of getting the legal regime next year at the climate summit in Paris.

Even though climate change policies have been formulated with the active involvement of trade unions and other civil society organisations, the policy is still largely unknown let alone being implemented with stakeholder involvement.

Additionally, there is no clarity about how such a policy is going to be financed. It is against this backdrop that FES and GAWU planned the conference.

The Resident Director of FES, Daniela Kuzu, said Germany is at the forefront of employing renewable energy sources to combat the effect of over-reliance on fossil fuels; and said in the process, billions of euro are expended since 23 percent of Germany’s energy needs are renewable energy-based.

The big question remains how to finance climate change mitigation and adaptation. She said FES and GAWU have had a long-standing relationship on climate change since 2007, and the conference is meant to dissect the national policy and look at ways of sourcing funding.

In the opinion of Ms. Kuzu, the industrialised west bears the biggest responsibility for greenhouse emissions and should be at the forefront of providing critical finance to mitigate the problem for the developing world.