The Sunday News
Judith Phiri, Business Reporter
THE Ministry of Environment, Climate, Tourism and Hospitality Industry has urged universities to be climate resilient and proffer solutions that can address climate change issues in the country.
This comes after the Ministry in March signed climate change mainstreaming agreements with seven universities in the country which include University of Zimbabwe (UZ), National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Lupane State University (LSU), Midlands State University (MSU), Great Zimbabwe University (GZU), Bindura University of Science Education and Chinhoyi University of Technology (CUT).
Speaking during the presentation of research outputs and awarding of certificates of the climate change mainstreaming research programme on Tuesday at NUST, director of climate change management in the Ministry, Mr Washington Zhakata said to overcome some natural disasters such as cyclones, universities had to be climate resilient.
“The programme is coming as a result of the need for us to become climate resilient and lower carbon emission by year 2030. We do not want to see a situation whereby when we have a cyclone, people continue to die and infrastructure affected.
“The Government saw it fit by coming up with Vision 2030 where the goal is to become an upper middle to upper income economy, but if we are not climate resilient it’s going to be a problem, we will not manage to attain that vision,” said Mr Zhakata.
He said Government was losing millions of dollars due to disasters which were climate change induced hence the need to properly plan how to rebuild the destroyed infrastructure. Mr Zhakata said there was need to come up with new structures which can adapt to climate change when repairing or rebuilding destroyed infrastructure.
“We should have a situation now where we study every infrastructure, to ensure that its strong enough so that we do not continue wasting money. The bridges that are being swept away are not because they are not strong, but it’s just that their design did not take into account the current trend with respect to weather and climate.”
He said members of the Provincial Development Committees (PDC) should desist from reconstructing damaged infrastructure using the same design that was done in the 1970s.
