COPENHAGEN (AlertNet) Â? Efforts to help developing nations adapt to climate change are doomed to failure unless good governance
and ethics are integral elements of financial assistance, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Wangari Maathai warned Friday.
That goes for both recipient nations and donors countries, Maathai said. The Kenyan environmentalist won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her work on environmentally sustainable
development and forest protection.
African leaders may ship assistance dollars to Swiss bank accounts, she said. But Swiss bankers accept the funds. Donors who rightly criticise Africa's powerful for buying expensive cars with aid money are often too complacent when much of the money they donate goes to pricey consultants from their own nations, she said.
"If we do not have good governance back home, we cannot get anywhere," said Maathai, who has witnessed Kenya's struggles with corruption first-hand, including for a time as the country's deputy environment minister. "We cannot develop our countries if we're going to continue with corruption on both sides."
As a result, good values need to be "part of what we embrace from Copenhagen," she urged at the opening session of "Development and Climate Days", a four-day programme focusing on
development and adaptation issues related to climate change.
Maathai said forest destruction at home had been an important contributor to climate change, particularly prolonged droughts that are worsening hunger in Kenya and producing serious economic problems.
Kenya, which is suffering a five-year drought, this year had to shutter a hydroelectric dam after river levels fell and the turbine blades stuck in the mud. The dam, designed to power
Kenya for 100 years, lasted only 30, Maathai said.
In a country that gets 70 percent of its power from hydroelectricity, the shutdown left homes and industries with rationed power. Thousands were sent home from their jobs, she said.
The drought also hurt the country's famed wildlife, with wildebeest breaking their legs leaping into dried-up riverbeds during their annual migration. Images of dried up elephant
carcasses in game parks and other dead animals killed by the drought have had a negative effect on tourism and tourism jobs, she said.
The message is that the bad economic effects that climate change can bring "happen very quickly if you are very, very vulnerable", and in Africa many countries already "are on the edge all the time".
"In some of these countries (climate change) is a matter of life and death," she said. "It's amazing how quickly it happens."
She urged negotiators at the Copenhagen talks to develop policies to stem deforestation and forest degradation a key part of a new global pact to curb climate change.
Policies aimed at protecting natural forests should not be extended to plantations of pines, eucalyptus, oil palms or other introduced species, she said, nor to tea plantations.
Tropical forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo -- the second largest in the world after the Amazon forest -- deserve special protection she said. If such forests are cut or burned
and the carbon they hold released, "all the rest we are trying to do (to curb climate change) will come to nothing," she predicted.
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