by Erick Mhando (ELP 2016) | Secretary & Project Leader, Community Universal Development Initiative, Tanzania

As part of the 2016 Beahrs Environmental Leadership Program (ELP), I had the opportunity to study climate change and environmental leadership under the tutelage of Professor Dan Kammen and David Roland-Holst. They explained more about how the world deals with the issues of global warming and climate change, and explained some new skills which will help me deal with climate change in my country and world as a whole.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC): CC refers to “a change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and that is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.

In my country, Tanzania, we have experienced the effect of global warming due to an increase in temperature that has resulted in drought and changing of weather. This leads to environmental, social and economic impacts.

Impacts of climate changes are as follows: Low crop production, Decrease water ice cap at Mount Kilimanjaro, Decrease of water, level of Lake Victoria, Water shortage in rivers, Increase conflicts in natural resources, Increase of food price, Floods in cities: for example, in Dar es Salaam, Increase of diseases, Environmental destructions, etc. This also results in more reproductive activities than productive activities. For example, men stay idle with nothing to do due to poor soil quality for production.

The subject learned through various discussions is that now the developed countries have started taking the issues of climate change seriously and after they realized that they are the major polluters in the world. Also they have experienced the effects of climate change in their countries. For example in China, the rate of air pollution diseases has now increased to the extent that they signed conventions to cut down the emissions of carbon dioxide.