Vice President Ousainou Darboe has affirmed that in
line with the national development policies, President Adama Barrow
administration is willing to support all efforts geared towards reducing
the impact of climate change.
He said that there is no longer
any doubt that human activities cause serious global warning yet human
being are a threat to the environment, so is climate change a direct
threat to human and a source of many other threats and disasters. These
remarks were made during a two-day seminar on ‘Climate Change and
Renewable Energy’ and ‘Climate Change and Land Use’ which was jointly
organised by the Ministry of Higher Education, Research, Science and
technology (MoHERST) in collaboration with the University of The Gambia
(UTG). The programme was funded by the German Ministry of Higher
Education and Research Science (BMBF) held at a hotel in Bakau. “Climate
change is acknowledged as a growing threat to the environment,
livelihood, food security and economic growth; thus food insecurity for
instance comes with economic risk as scarcity of staple crops cause
crises in prises,” he stressed.
In the Gambia specifically, the
vice president stated that food insecurity cause a serious threat as a
result of acute erratic rainfall patterns, draughts and floods all of
which can be associated with climate change. He said “Some of which
force our rural farming population especially the youths to abandon the
agricultural lands and move to urban areas thereby increasing the
population and unemployment”.
He further pointed out that climate
change also contributes to irregular migration to Europe as the youths
explore opportunities elsewhere.
The Vice President reminded that
the seminar serves as an important step towards implementing The
Gambia’s commitments on the 21st conference of parties of UN conference
on climate change held in Paris in 2015” he stated. For his part, Badara
Joof, the minister of MoHERST said that they should go beyond the
seminar and generate issues of climate change and the environmental
impact that it has. “I want to domesticate this within the context of
the UTG where we would domesticate the knowledge that we would gain from
Germany and WASCAL, index it into the Faculty of Research on Climate
Change and Environmental Management” he said.
He added that it
will enable them to maintain the knowledge since they know that they are
having challenges of environmental issues. “It is part of the policy
changes and the orientations of the UTG and MoHERST policy in general
that research is as important and crucial to things because if we are
teaching for the future,” he elaborated.
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