Africa-Press – Botswana. It is vital that in formulating the national development budget, government infuse climate change adaptation measures in its plans and allocate resources to adaptation measures.
Deputy Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Environment and Tourism, Mr Boatametse Modukanele said this during a capacity-building workshop organised for Members of Parliament on November 1.
Mr Modukanele said allocating funds and resources to climate change adaptation measures would help eliminate the urgency to divert funds from other developmental priorities to cater for climate change issues.
He urged various ministries to always look at their plans and budgets critically and see whether they addressed issues of climate change.
“Climate change issues affect even the rural communities which are the mandate of every ministry. Government is also aware of the need for building resilience to the effects of climate change by reducing the severity of its impact,” he said.
He pointed out that government had a greater ambition in promoting equitable growth of people in order to improve their wellbeing, hence always trying to strike a balance between developing new fossil fuel energy plants such as coal plants, and solar generated power.
“Government is currently working on a programme to increase the contribution of solar energy to about 15 per cent by the year 2030. This is in a way trying to respond to the impact of climate change,” he said.
He stated that climate change action presented numerous challenges for legislators as it was widely tied to other developmental needs, such as agriculture, energy availability, health and water scarcity.
He said that this raised a need for climate change legislation to be part of a larger policy framework that supported equitable, sustainable and inclusive development
Mr Modukanele hailed the capacity building workshop as the country was currently preparing for the COP28 in Dubai, an annual global gathering that discusses and makes decisions on issues of climate change.
“A number of issues are expected to be discussed there, some of them pertinent to Botswana and will affect our development agenda, therefore we need to prepare ourselves and be in a position to know how to negotiate.
“It is a fact that climate change is a developmental issue that no country is immune to due to the low levels of adaptive capacity in developing countries and inadequate distribution of climate change data. This leads to climate change hitting developing countries like Botswana hard because our adaptive capacity is low,” he said.
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