{"id":50779,"date":"2024-04-29T12:37:33","date_gmt":"2024-04-29T11:37:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.climatechangenews.com\/?p=50779"},"modified":"2024-05-01T09:17:25","modified_gmt":"2024-05-01T08:17:25","slug":"drought-study-raises-tricky-questions-for-loss-and-damage-fund","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.climatechangenews.com\/2024\/04\/29\/drought-study-raises-tricky-questions-for-loss-and-damage-fund\/","title":{"rendered":"Southern Africa drought flags dilemma for loss and damage fund"},"content":{"rendered":"

Since January, swathes of southern Africa have been suffering from a severe drought, which has destroyed crops, spread disease and caused mass hunger. But its causes have raised tough questions for the new UN fund for climate change losses.
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Christopher Dabu, a priest in Lusitu parish in southern Zambia, one of the affected regions, said that because of the drought, his parishioners “have nothing”- including their staple food.<\/p>\n

“Almost every day, there’s somebody who comes here to knock on this gate asking for mielie meal, [saying] ‘Father, I am dying of hunger’,” Dabu told Climate Home outside his church last month.<\/p>\n

The government and some humanitarian agencies were quick to blame the lack of rain on climate change<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Zambia’s green economy minister Collins Nzovu told reporters in March, “there’s a lot of infrastructure damage as a result of climate change”. He added that the new UN-backed loss and damage fund, now being set up to help climate change victims, “must speak to this”.<\/p>\n

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Reverend Christopher Dabu outside his church in Lusitu, Zambia (Photo: Joe Lo)<\/p><\/div>\n

But last week, scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group published a study<\/a> which found that “climate change did not emerge as the significant driver” of the current drought affecting Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Angola, Mozambique and Botswana.<\/p>\n

Instead, they concluded that the El Ni\u00f1o phenomenon – which occurs every few years with warming of sea surface temperatures in the eastern Pacific Ocean<\/a> – was the drought’s “key driver”. They said the damage was worsened by the vulnerabilities of the countries affected, including reliance on rain-fed farming rather than irrigation.<\/p>\n