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Nairobi - Climate change is a development issue for Africa, experts warned at a United Nations workshop in Nairobi this week.

The developed countries might have created the problem of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, but all countries, and especially African countries, were going to have to deal with the consequences, politicians and scientists agreed.

"It will directly impact agriculture, which is what drives development," said Louis Verchot, climate change scientist with the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF).

'The drivers of climate change are not going to stop' 
The meeting painted a grim picture of some of the consequences of changing climates for food security on the continent. In many areas the length of the growing season could be halved by the middle of next century. There also would be more variability in rainfall, which was bad for farmers. Some areas would be prone to droughts, others to floods.

Predictions of the future were always open to cynicism, Verchot agreed, but evidence from weather stations over the last half a century should convince even the most hardened sceptic that human activities were causing rapid, and unprecedented temperature and rainfall changes across the globe.

"We need to adapt. We need to give farmers more options," said Verchot, whose institute is working on extension programs that provide information to people farming the land about what to expect, and how to cope with the changes.

He said governments often got sucked into global discussions on how to reduce greenhouse gases and avoided the more difficult questions of how to inform and prepare their citizens for the changes to come.

Lars Haltbrekken, Climate Change information officer at the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), agreed that initiatives to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere were long-term solutions. He said the reality was that even if the targets of the Kyoto Protocol were followed to the letter, the world would continue to get warmer and more variable.

However, it was not all bad news. Vercher said weather forecasting was continually improving and there was already reliable information available about what to expect, from region to region and from year to year. This meant, with appropriate infrastructure and information services in place, that people should not have to go hungry because of fluctuating weather conditions.

"In the future we are going to be responding to continuously moving targets."

Verchot said the key to surviving under these conditions was diversity: diversity in types of crops available, diversity in markets for selling whatever crops the land would produce, and diversity of economies, so that not all people were dependent on cultivating small pieces of land for their survival.

"We need to increase farmeris access to different markets, so they can sell whatever crops they are able to produce," he told the meeting.

Asked whether farmers were receptive to the information ICRAF was trying to disseminate he said it was unclear. "We are in the first year of our project, and this year we predict better rainfall the areas we are working in, so farmers are not going to have to change their crops dramatically."

Civil society groups could go some way towards disseminating information, but obviously it was essential for African governments could take up the issue as well, said Verchot.

Nobel peace laureate, and Kenyan minister Wangari Maathai, who also spoke at the meeting, agreed that informing the people about how their lives would be affected by changing climates was essential.

"We need to give them simple, do-able solutions," she told the meeting, saying African leaders should start to embrace their people and act in their interests, instead of the interests of those with power and money.

The meeting, which runs until Friday, was part of the United Nations Environmental Programme's outreach programme on climate change.

Africa produced less than 10 percent of the total industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, Paul Desanker, from Penn State University in America said.  It was not Africa's job to solve the greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere, but it was Africa's job to deal with the consequences.

Vercher suggested that available money would be better spent on agricultural extension programmes than on sending a large group of delegates to annual Conference of the Parties (to the Kyoto Protocol) meetings.

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