When most of a country’s wealth is in the wild, shifts in natural systems can wreak havoc with its economy.

Namibia is a case in point. Its natural legacy underpins much of the national bank balance — and also leaves it highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. In fact, research suggests the impacts on natural resources alone could reduce the country’s GDP by 1 to 6 per cent.

The need to mainstream climate change into national policies and planning is clear, not least because the poor will be most affected.

Employment opportunities could shrink and wages fall, with incomes for unskilled labour dropping by 24 per cent in a worst-case scenario.

So along with ‘climate-proofed’ policies and activities, Namibia needs a strategy to deal with displaced farmers and farmworkers. But it is up to industrialised nations — the most responsible for climate change — to help Namibia and other vulnerable countries cope with the impacts and plan for a climate-constrained future.

The realisation is growing that poor nations will suffer most from the effects of climate change. This vulnerability stems partly from their location in areas such as drought-prone sub-Saharan Africa or flood-prone Bangladesh.

Their capacity to cope with climate change is also low because of limited financial resources, skills and technologies and high levels of poverty. And they rely heavily on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture and fishing. Namibia is very dependent on natural resources: some estimate that up to 30 per cent of its GDP is reliant on the environment.

Ironically, it is also these poor nations that have contributed least to climate change. Data covering 1950 to 2000 from the Climate Analysis Indicators Tool, developed by the World Resources Institute, indicates that African countries contributed 4.6 per cent of cumulative global carbon emissions during that period.

Today their share of emissions is just 3.5 per cent of the total. Namibia was in fact estimated to be a net sink for carbon dioxide in 1994 due to the large uptake of CO2 by trees. The country contributed less than 0.05 per cent to global CO2 equivalent emissions in 1994, even when this carbon sink is excluded from calculations.

Increasingly, countries are recognising the need to assess the likely impact of climate change on their desired development pathways, and to ensure all policies and activities are ‘climateproof’. While climate change clearly must be mainstreamed into policies and planning, the way this will happen is less clear.

Temperatures in Namibia have been rising at three times the global mean increases reported for the 20th century. The rise in temperature predicted for 2100 ranges from 2 to 6°C. Particularly in the central regions, lower rainfall is expected, while overall rainfall is projected to become even more variable than it is now.

Even if rainfall changes little from today’s levels, hotter temperatures will boost evaporation rates, leading to severe water shortages. Poor rural pastoralist and dryland populations will be affected most.

Extreme events such as drought are likely to become more frequent and more intense. There may be less plant cover and productivity on grassland and savannah in response to relatively scant rainfall and more evaporation.

Grassy savannah may also become less dominant as desertification occurs in some areas, and shrubs and trees benefit from higherlevels of CO2 in others.

Impacts on the marine environment are uncertain, but scenarios range
from dramatic ecosystem responses that reduce their overall productivity to more intense coastal upwellings — the wind-driven movements of
cooler, nutrient-rich water to the ocean surface - which would increase productivity.

Namibian natural resource experts have further worked to quantify, as much as possible, the economic impacts of climate change on Namibia’s natural resource base.

Estimates of how climate change will affect various sectors, and subsequent translation into economic impacts, can only be best guesses. Expert estimates suggest, however, that over 20 years, annual losses to the Namibian economy could be between 1 and 6 per cent of GDP — that is, between US$70 million and $200 million — if no action is taken to adapt to climate change.

Combining data from the NRA with Namibia’s Social Accounting Matrix (SAM) provides the chance to see who will be hit hardest by the impacts of climate change on the environment.

The SAM is a database that provides information on activities in different economic sectors and helps identify the poverty status of different groups.

Evidence from lowincome countries around the world suggests that the people likely to be most affected by climate change are the poorest and most vulnerable.

And in Namibia, results show that climate change impacts will hit the poor hardest, with employment opportunities constrained and a substantial decline in wages, especially for unskilled labour.

Even under the best-case scenarios generated by the CGE model,
subsistence farming will be sharply reduced. In the worst-case scenario for agriculture, labour intensive livestock farming is hit hard, and while high-value irrigated crop production could thrive, job creation in this area would be minimal.

Thus, even under the best-case scenario, a quarter of the population will need to find new livelihoods