Sitting in Nairobi airport with four hours to kill after Ethiopian Airlines greedily overbooked the flight I was supposed to be on from Addis Ababa to Johannesburg and subsequently had to divert me via Nairobi, followed by a painful overnighter in Johannesburg before I can finally make my way back home tomorrow morning to Windhoek. Bleh. But anyway – it gives me time for this.
My last five days were spent in Addis Ababa at a workshop organised by the Secretariat of the United Nations Convention on Biodiversity on updating the National Biodiversity Strategy and Action Plans for the countries of Africa. Can I hear you snoring already? Let me see if I can lose the terrible acronym-filled UN language....basically this was a gathering of African countries and “international experts” focusing on how to mainstream the importance of biodiversity, and indeed the natural system into our countries’ development. I was sent as “resource person” (whatever that means) on effective communication – which, as we are slowly realising, is integrally important to get messages across to various facets of society, whether it be to policy-makers or the little guy on the street. As I write this I see on CNN a story on turtles in Gabon...mmmm...maybe things aren’t as bleak as I seem to think.
But yar. It seems that, even though we (unknowingly) depend on biodiversity and environmental services for our daily function, we still, in this day and age, manage to completely undervalue it in our decision-making. Perhaps because we get it for free....and take it for granted...so much so that we don’t seem to care if we degrade it. It reminds me of the Millenium Assessment’s results from 2005 (a global survey on the state of our natural system) – a very stark reminder of what we are doing to our Earth...and to ourselves. One of the most humbling statements “Any progress achieved in addressing the goals of poverty and hunger eradication, improved health, and environmental protections is unlikely to be sustained if most of the ecosystem services on which humanity relies continues to be degraded”. So now we sit at this unnecessarily formal conference venue discussing, in oh-so-typical UN delegate fashion, how to go about mainstreaming biodiversity into our national development plans. Very interesting and passionate people. But we are environmental people. And yet we are trying to find ways to communicate the value of ecosystem services across sectors.
How much would you be willing to pay for clean air? For a view that takes your breath away? For a mangrove swamp that will save your life when a massive hurricane comes along? How much are you willing to pay to protect a dune system that has evolved over millions of years, in which a complex network of wind and sand dynamics shifts integral nutrients to your agricultural production system?
For centuries we have not put any value on these things. What we have valued however, are things which have no value (gold!?). We undervalue the basic underlying roots for life on Earth. And we are paying for it. Unfortunately not enough of us know about this. And those of us who do struggle to communicate this to the people in power. Well, so there I sat at this conference and pondered my fellow Africans. Somehow, we in Africa, with “our problems”, have managed to maintain most of the valued ecosystem services and biodiversity (although a lot of it lies on the edge). Do we need to keep copying pasting systems deemed as “successful” (and what are these systems looking like now) from the west? Systems that are showing major failures and are destructive...Or shall we look at what has worked well in Africa and how to showcase our amazing stories? We are so much closer still to nature (although this is changing as we aspire to this so-called “American dream” – people moving from their rural areas to urban slums in the vain naive hope that it will bring them this “aspiration”), and if so, can’t we still find our own ways to become successful and wealthy (defined in different ways) than our western counterparts who are now facing the consequences of their destructive actions? I think we can. But we need to start valuing our own systems of success, stop being spoon-fed, and taking charge for our own continent. This starts with our own confidence. And the hope for a new system of success...where the well-being of our people is more important than the monetary wealth of the few people on the top.
No comments:
Post a Comment