‘One-size-fits-all’ climate policy disastrous!

By Wisdom Mdzungairi

AT precisely the same time, two university scientists recently published a paper studying virtually the same data and finding little significant change.

Further, they found that any changes in these patterns, known as atmospheric “blocking”, under which weather tends to stagnate, were small compared to natural year-to-year variability. In what is always a bad sign for solid science, they found that any connections between blocking frequency and global warming are highly dependent upon the methodology they used. The bottom line — they couldn’t find much of a signal, and even if they did, they weren’t sure what it all meant.

The difference is that death and destruction sell advertisement copy, while, as the story goes, “dog bites man” doesn’t. But, in climate change, there’s a remarkable disconnection between what people read and what they think.

Well, there is another difference — a result is generally more interesting than a null result, except to certain sections of researchers. An unnamed scientist, for instance, has a long string of null results to his name and flogs them “endlessly”.

Of course, another common trick is to misrepresent the contents of a study. So it would be helpful if one deigned to, you know, tell us the author or title of the paper.

Anyway, the publication and celebration of null results is a peculiar feature of climate science. Outsiders seem quick to confuse “no proven link” with “proven no link”, which I suppose is the point.

But, our challenge has always been that partial narratives that underpin policymaking in Zimbabwe prevent people from fulfilling their potential to provide food and sustain resilient livelihoods in a changing climate.

The new research, co-ordinated by the International Institute for Environment and Development, was presented at the 7th International Conference on Community-Based Adaptation to Climate Change in Dhaka, Bangladesh, on April 22-25.

Scientists say: “Policymakers often dismiss the world’s drylands as fragile ecosystems where highly variable, unpredictable and scattered rainfall is seen as a fundamental constraint to food production that compels local people to over-farm or over-graze their land, thereby exacerbating scarcity and degradation, further reducing productivity and inducing desertification, conflict and migration.”

This ignores both the dynamics of dryland ecosystems and how communities such as those in the Masvingo and Matabeleland regions have long learnt how to live with and harness this variability to support sustainable and productive economies, societies and ecosystems.

Narratives that underpin global policymaking on agricultural development are necessary simplifications. However, such simplifications currently hide a fundamental alternative in the way of using unpredictably variable environments for food production — one in which people operate with variability rather than against it, adapt and turn variability into a valuable resource rather than resist and suffer it as a costly disturbance.

We are learning this from Kenya’s pastoral systems developed to operate in highly variable environments. In times of globalised weather volatility, this is no lesson to be missed.

Unfortunately, a “one-size-fits-all” policy response will not be viable. Instead, Zimbabwe urgently needs an alternative
macro-policy that focuses on

location-specific, decentralised, integrated, and knowledge-centric approach that pro-actively exploits diversity and variability to sustain and enhance production.

Zimbabwe, among others, has suffered from severe regional weather extremes in recent years, such as the heatwave coinciding with last week’s unprecedented hailstorms that left a trail of destruction in Harare, Rutenga and Mangwe districts. Behind these devastating individual events, there is a common physical cause, some scientists proposed. Their study suggests that man-made climate change repeatedly disturbs the patterns of atmospheric flow around the globe through a subtle resonance mechanism.

Nevertheless, the study significantly advances the understanding of the relation between weather extremes and man-made climate change.

Scientists were surprised by how far outside past experience some of the recent extremes have been. This new data shows that the emergence of extraordinary weather is not just a linear response to the mean warming trend, and the proposed mechanism could explain that.

Given the team involved, it’s unlikely that there are obvious serious flaws with this paper. This could be a major result.

millenniumzimbabwe@yahoo.com twitter @wisdomdzungairi