Matuil Haq Khalis of the Afghan environmental protection agency called for support from the international community, which had excluded the Taliban from international meetings for the past three years. The intensity of the floods, combined with periods of prolonged drought, is causing an increasing number of internally displaced people, while agriculture is performing less and less. UN agency projects cover only a third of the provinces.
Baku (/Agencies) – For the first time since the Taliban returned to power in Afghanistan in 2021, a delegation will participate (as an observer) in COP29, the United Nations climate talks that opened yesterday in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Matuil Haq Khalis, head of the Afghan environmental protection agency, declared that the country needs international support to face extreme phenomena. Then responding to an observation about the fact that women are more vulnerable to climate impacts than men (a fact confirmed by UN assessments), Khalis responded that “the impact of climate change has no limitations, it can have repercussions on women, children, men, plants or animals, and therefore collective work is necessary to face this problem.”
Some experts have confirmed the need for the Taliban to also participate in the climate conference: “A whole series of politically unpleasant states with all kinds of atrocious records of one kind or another are participating. “Where do we draw the line?” said Joanna Depledge, a climate historian at the University of Cambridge, England.
Afghanistan is the sixth most vulnerable country in the world to climate change. Among low-income countries, it ranks second for the number of deaths caused by natural disasters between 1980 and 2015. Over the past 40 years, rainfall has been 25% heavier, and only in March of this year did people die at least 300 people due to flash floods. In April there were at least 70 deaths and some 2,000 homes destroyed. At the same time, 25 of the 34 provinces are in severe drought conditions. It seems contradictory, but in reality it means that the intervals between rainfall are increasingly longer, and when it rains, due to the greater aridity of the soil, the probability of disastrous phenomena occurring is greater.
According to a recent study by Save the ChildrenIn the first six months of 2024 alone, extreme events forced at least 38,000 people – around half of whom were children – to leave their homes. A figure that in half a year exceeds the number of displaced people registered in all of 2023, of 37,076 people. At the end of last year, Afghanistan also recorded the highest number of children in the world left homeless due to environmental disasters: 747,094.
Since 2022, extreme phenomena are the first cause of displacement, after decades in which war had determined population movements. And 2024 is the third consecutive year in which permanent drought conditions are verified, in a country where 80% of the population depends on agriculture.
Today, more than one in three people are severely food insecure due to high food prices, in turn determined by the climate crisis. But not only that, some studies have shown that plant yields in Afghanistan have been halved due to toxins released by explosive devices. The presence of antipersonnel mines and demining activities also influence soil erosion, according to experts, causing greater damage in the event of earthquakes and floods.
Due to decades of conflict and rampant poverty, Afghanistan is also, then, one of the countries in the world with the least capacity to confront climate change. Before the Taliban returned to power, the United Nations they estimated that the country needed $20.6 billion to finance climate adaptation initiatives (and emissions reduction between now and 2030, although the country emits very little compared to industrialized countries).
The exclusion of the Taliban from the world stage from 2021 has been accompanied by a reduction in funding for climate resilience. Some UN and EU agencies, together with some NGOs that have a historical presence in the country, continue to carry out a series of projects, trying to prevent funds from ending up directly in the Taliban’s accounts. But, As some researchers have pointed outthese programs cover only a third of the country’s provinces, and a large part of the Afghan population is still left out.
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