By Wallace Mawire
The government of Zimbabwe through the Ministry of Environment, Climate, Tourism and Hospitality Industry with support from the United Nations Development Programme has developed a nation-wide Knowledge, Attitudes and Perception (KAP) survey on climate change issues.
It is reported that the activity seeks to develop and consolidate the ongoing data collection process for the KAP Survey which will outline the Knowledge, Attitudes and Perception on climate change issues in the country.
The KAP survey is a key element towards the development of a two-way communications strategy for Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
In 2019, the government of Zimbabwe launched the NDC Implementation Framework to guide implementation of the current energy sector focused NDC.
Building on these achievements, the draft Zimbabwe Low greenhouse gas Emission Development Strategy (LEDS) follows an economy-wide approach. The LEDS covers mitigation in all Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sectors (Energy, Industrial Processes and Product Use (IPPU), Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Use (AFOLU), and Waste). The LEDS also provides a framework for developing an economy wide NDC.
A central pillar of NDC planning, accelerating and raising ambition is coordinated advocacy and communications initiatives to shift attitudes and behaviours on climate change.
A Climate Change Communications Consultant has been engaged to help design a two-way communications strategy aimed at shifting the attitudes and behaviours of targeted audiences on climate change.
The strategy will ensure that key NDC message on climate change is tailored and reaches to the right audiences and would change behaviour where it needs to be changed.
It is also expected to also help also overcome current approaches to climate advocacy which operate almost exclusively in echo chambers, missing key target audiences.
The new and more sophisticated approach to climate communications is needed help deliver the Zimbabwe’s NDC commitments
According to Article 4 of the Paris Agreement, each Party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is required to prepare, communicate and maintain successive Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to support the achievement of the long-term goal of keeping global temperature rise well-below 2°C whilst pursuing efforts to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial level. Zimbabwe’s first NDCs are limited to climate change mitigation in the energy sector covering prominently the power and transport sectors, as well as adaptation in agriculture. The NDCs target to reduce energy-related GHG emissions per capita by 33% below the Business-As-Usual (BAU) scenario by 2030.
Globally, there is an urgent need to accelerate the implementation of NDCs and to identify ways for increased ambition. COP24 set out procedures and mechanisms to operationalize the Paris Agreement. It provides guidance on how the NDCs are to be presented, the contents and approach of the mitigation goals and activities and the modalities for operation and use of the public NDC registry. Furthermore, it defines procedures and guidelines for the Enhanced Transparency Framework, including the information to be provided in the first and subsequent Biennial Transparency Reports on tracking the progress of the implementation and achievement of NDCs.
