Overcoming the Barriers to Environmental Sustainability in Africa

It is common knowledge that the issue of environmentally friendly sustainable development cannot be overlooked if the African continent is to meet its development objectives. One branch of development does not overpower another hence the need for balanced or round development.

Education for Sustainable Development: Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a major tool that can be used to break down the obstacles to environmental sustainability in Africa. Education for Sustainable Development is a term describing the practice of teaching for sustainability. The following skills are essential to ESD: Critical Thinking, Systemic Thinking, Envisioning, Building partnerships, and participation in decision-making. By participation in decision-making, we mean empowering people. Dialogue and negotiations should be promoted, and people should learn to work together in order to build strong partnerships.

Systemic Thinking involves acknowledging complexities in life and looking for links and synergies when trying to find solutions to problems. Envisioning is being able to imagine a better future. The premise is that is if we know where we want to go, we will be better able to work out how to get there. Critical Thinking and Reflection: This deals with learning to question our current belief systems and to recognize the assumptions underlying our knowledge, perspective and opinions. Critical thinking skills help people learn to examine economic, environmental, social and cultural structures in the context of sustainable development.

Strengthen Africa’s capacity to implement multilateral environmental agreements:

African countries should not only be signatories to multilateral environmtal agreements but should be implementers as well. African countries are signatories to most multilateral environmental agreements that showcase global consensus on the causes and effects of environmental challenges. Examples include the Montreal Protocols, the Convention on Biological Diversity, the Convention to Combat Desertification and many others. However, most of the time, African governments lack the capacity to implement these agreements or respect the commitments therein. That is why multilateral initiatives such as the Global Environmental Fund (GEF) should be given more funding in order to help Africa meet these objectives.

Seek assistance to improve effectiveness of institutions, policies and regulatory capacity:

African countries need to demonstrate their capacity to be able to tackle these challenges. Most countries in Africa have established environmental institutions and, along with them, the legislative basis and administrative procedures for environmental management. However, progress is limited by lack of adequate human, technical and financial resources, and ineffective institutional arrangements.  In addition, the quest for foreign direct investment (FDI) often leads to compromises in the strict enforcement of environmental laws, which tends to perpetuate unsustainable resource use patterns. There are still projects being undertaken without adequate environmental assessment, and/or the adequate mitigation and follow-up processes are compromised.

Develop capacity to carry out strategic environmental assessments of current policies and programs:

There has been noticeable progress in project level environmental impact assessment capacity, but there is a bigger need to equally develop capacity in strategic environmental assessment (SEA). SEA is a pro-active measure that aims to integrate environmental considerations into proposed laws, policies, plans and programs. Strategic environmental assessments would enable these more important, higher order or strategic decisions to be subjected to environmental and social scrutiny.

Promote environmental management:

Also, there exists a need for national governments to engage the private sector effectively to provide business solutions to environmental challenges. Innovations that enable the achievement of national environmental priorities should as well be rewarded by the governments of the various African countries.

Creating awareness at the community level:

Through increased awareness, attitude re-orientation and the provision of alternatives, individual and communal action could be a vital force in the long run in achieving ecologically friendly sustainable development. At the community level, the message of environmental management ought to be re-packaged to reflect African values. The recognition of the moral obligation not to starve coming generations of resources needed for their future development should be an incentive for present Africans to use resources in a more sustainable way, given the importance that Africans place on inheritance.

Although the challenge ahead of the African continent is a big one, we can still achieve environmentally sustainable development. Africans just need to be committed to the cause at both national and community level, and keep in mind that our children’s future depends on how we manage our resources now Efficient resource management will guarantee the well-being of future generations. Failure to do so will be detrimental to their survival in the world.