Act now to avert effects of extreme weather
Caroline Gathii
“The world cannot wait for the fog of geopolitical and geo-economic uncertainty to lift.
Opting to ride out the current period in the hope that the global system will “snap back” runs the risk of missing crucial windows to address pressing challenges.
On key issues such as the economy, the environment, technology and public health, stakeholders must find ways to act quickly and with purpose within an unsettled global landscape.”
This is an excerpt in the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Risks Report . The report comes as interconnected risks are being felt and will greatly shape the coming decade.
It categorises risk into four areas—Economic, Environmental, Geopolitical, Societal and Technological.
The risks are measured through the lens of likelihood and impact. It lists the top five risks in terms of likelihood as extreme weather, climate action failure, natural disasters, biodiversity loss and human-made environmental disasters.
These means that it is very likely that these risks will affect the world in 2020 and the coming decade.
The report has also listed the top five risks in terms of impact as climate action failure, weapons of mass destruction, biodiversity loss, extreme weather and water crisis.
Impact means that when these risks occur then they would pose a big threat in the world.
The highest risk under likelihood is extreme weather and its impact had been felt in all the five continents.
It will be foolhardy to ignore the other indicators—climate action failure, natural disasters, biodiversity loss and human-made environmental disasters— but there is no doubt that extreme weather will be a factor to watch in Kenya and across Africa.
Policy makers in Kenya and across Africa should be worried about extreme weather patterns as the report notes, “the last five years are on track to be the warmest on record and natural disasters are becoming more intense and more frequent”.
In Africa for instance, Mozambique last year experienced Cyclone Kenneth which killed several people and left millions homeless.
The Global Risks Report is the result of a multi-stakeholder process and it seems to echo what is being said in several other quarters.
A related report, Suffering in Silence by CARE International, echoes the Global Risks Report and cautions on the dangers ahead.
“Kenya has been facing droughts in recent years, with the most severe hitting the country in 2016/17.
Scientists found that the probability of such a drought has doubled because of human-made climate change raising sea-surface temperatures.
The CARE report says agricultural production has halved, yet the Kenyan economy is highly dependent on the sector that is equally dependant on the weather.
In Kenya, agriculture contributes approximately 35 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and constitutes 40 per cent of export earnings.
The risk of extreme whether has a direct impact to the Kenyan economy. It means that if this sector is being halved then our GDP and our export earnings will be affected by a significant margin.
The Global Risks Report also points that alongside the issues of extreme weather, “the health systems around the world are at risk of becoming unfit for purpose”.
New vulnerabilities resulting from changing societal, environmental, demographic and technological patterns threaten to undo gains in health systems in the last century.
Non-communicable diseases such as cardiovascular diseases and mental illness have replaced infectious diseases as the leading cause of death.
Progress against pandemics is also being undermined by vaccine hesitancy and drug resistance, making it increasingly difficult to land the final blow against some of humanity’s biggest killers.
As existing health risks resurge and new ones emerge, the latest being China’s novel coronavirus
The Global Risks Report should jolt stakeholders into action in developing sustainable, integrated solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges.
—The writer is an International Certified Risk Expert at FirstIdea Consulting Limited
