Paris — ClimDev-Africa) - The Executive Secretary of the African Ministerial Council on Water (AMCOW), Mr. Bai Mass Taal, has welcomed the central position that water has taken in the climate change discourse, globally.
Mr. Taal, who was speaking in Paris today at a High-Level Panel discussion on Water and Climate Change in the context of the Sustainable Development Goals, said that it is no longer possible to talk about climate change without talking about water, adding that it is now impossible to imagine development programmes without considering the impact of water in their implementation.
According to him, it is not for nothing that water and climate change are regularly cited as the most serious crises that humanity will face in the coming decades. He proposed that the link between climate change and water issues has become so narrow that perhaps we should instead begin to talk about the two as a single development problem.
"When different regions are not confronted with problems of drought, they are under intense floods, melting ice, or rising sea levels.
"These are some of the arguments that should militate for the integration of water experts at every stage of climate negotiations," Taal added; and charged that climate change must not be reduced to an environmental matter, but must include hydrological and agriculture concerns.
Speaking on the same panel, Mr. Amadou Mansour Faye, President of AMCOW and Minister of Water and Sanitation of Senegal, supported the proposition and told the audience that his country had recently launched the extension of the Water, Climate and Development in Africa programme because, as he put it, water is life.
Water plays an important role at all levels of the climate system... be it in connection with the atmosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, land surface and the biosphere, the impacts of climate change are felt mainly through water, the Senegalese minister explained.
In Africa, sustainable social and economic development is critically dependent on the agricultural sector, on which some 70 percent of the population and 80 percent of the poor depend. However, only 7 percent of arable land in Africa is irrigated, a percentage that drops to 4 percent in sub-Saharan Africa. In contrast, irrigated land account for 38 percent of arable land in Asia.
As a result, agriculture in sub-Saharan Africa uses less than 3 percent of its water resources, against 20 percent in Asia. Given that a third of the sub-Saharan population is undernourished at the time when the continent should see its population increase from 700 million in 2015 to 1.2 billion in 2030, possibilities for improving livelihoods for rural communities through better management of water resources are unlimited.
The Executive Secretary of the African Ministerial Council on Water recalled that the year 2015 is a significant year for all countries of the world in general and for Africa in particular because "we are at the end of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) and because 2015 ushered in the post 2015-Agenda. Under the MDG's, the goal was to ensure that 50% of the population of Africa had access to safe drinking water and sanitation.
According to him, some progress has been made and AMCOW is working to facilitate water sanitation policies in many African countries. For instance, he noted that before 2002 no African country had a ministry in charge of Water and Sanitation but that many - including Burkina Faso, Senegal, and Nigeria - now have such ministry.
Before closing the session, the panel discussion's facilitator, Ms. Fatima Denton, Director of Special Initiatives Division at ECA, outlined the challenges inherent in the provision of clean water Africa and praised water experts for their contribution towards a holistic approach that that has become the hallmark of climate change discussions in Africa.
