COVID-19 and Climate Change – Working with Communities and Nature to Build Resilience to Shocks and Stressors in Africa (By Dianne Tipping-Woods)

COVID-19 and Climate Change – Working with Communities and Nature to Build Resilience to Shocks and Stressors in Africa (By Dianne Tipping-Woods)

Farmer Ndaula Liwela, from Machita settlement in Namibia’s Zambezi province, points to the scattered flowers of a baobab tree lying on the dry ground close to her homestead. “The fruit this year will be small and few,” she says, even though the iconic tree is known for its ability to store water and thrive in dry conditions. It’s several weeks after she would normally have planted her crops, “but we stopped ploughing when we saw the clouds were not even starting to build”.

As the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) COP27 takes place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, from 6 to 18 November 2022, there are hopes that ‘the African COP’ will mobilise the funds and actions needed for a climate-resilient Africa, but this means very little to Liwela, whose immediate concern is around how to feed her family in the face of an increasingly uncertain future.

Her home in Namibia’s northernmost province lies within the Kavango Zambezi Transfrontier Conservation Area (KAZA), the five-country transboundary park formed to protect biodiversity while supporting people who live in the landscape. It is not far from the Zambezi River, but is water-scarce. Each year, Liwela supplements her livelihood by harvesting baobab and other