Watch: More than half of districts in Mozambique have meteorological stations – Nyusi at UN Climate Ambition Summit

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Watch: More than half of districts in Mozambique have meteorological stations – Nyusi at UN Climate Ambition Summit

2:22 CAT | 21 Sep 2023

Screen grab: UN Media

More than half of Mozambique’s 154 districts are already equipped with meteorological stations, the President of the Republic revealed at the United Nations on Wednesday, noting that this investment has already made it possible to mitigate the effects of cyclones in the country this year.

President Nyusi was adressing a thematic session on ‘Delivering climate justice: Accelerating ambition and implementation on adaptation and early warnings for all’ at the United Nations Climate Ambition Summit.

“In a process of adaptation to climate change, an early warning system is indispensable and plays a crucial role in reducing vulnerability and in increasing resilience of communities,” Filipe Nyusi told the Climate Ambition Summit at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

“We have been strengthening our response capacity through observation, forecast, communication and sharing of meteorological information. Our focus highlights the expansion and modernization of the meteorological observation network through the ‘One District, One Meteorological Station’ initiative. Of the existing 154 districts in the country, 88, or 57%, already have meteorological stations,” Nyusi added.

The Mozambican head of state participated on Wednesday afternoon in one of the high-level thematic sessions of the Climate Ambition Summit, which took place on the sidelines of the 78th annual meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, and highlighted that “as a result of this effort”, the recent tropical cyclone Freddy, “despite its magnitude”, in Mozambique “did not cause so many deaths as compared to other geographies “where it passed.

“And this was due to the readiness and the early warning system installed in the country, though improvements are still required,” Nyusi explained.

Intense rains and the passage of Cyclone Freddy affected more than 1.3 million people in Mozambique in the first quarter, destroying 236,000 homes and 3,200 classrooms in addition to causing 306 deaths, according to official data.

“In the framework of meteorological observation, we have commenced the implementation, with the support of the African Development Bank, of a project to install three meteorological radars. The first, with a 400 kilometres radio, has already been installed in the centre of the Mozambique. However, the country requires a total of seven radars for full observation coverage of the whole country,” he added.

Filipe Nyusi, who is the African Union’s champion for Disaster Risk Management, recalled that, at an event convened in collaboration with the African Union Commission, the World Meteorological Organization and the UN Office for Disaster Risk Reduction ,we launched the institutional framework for ‘Early Warning , Early Action and Multi-Risk and its r implementation programme have already been launched.

“In 2022, in Maputo, the governments of Southern African countries adopted the Maputo Declaration to establish an integrated early warning and early action system in our region and in the same year, signed the Maputo Declaration for Protection and Conservation of the Miombo Forest, an important ecosystem for carbon sequestration,” he said at the same forum.

In terms of energy transition, the President of Mozambique said that in the production of electrical power,, around 70% of production in Mozambique comes from hydro sources and 14% from natural gas: “And in the production of solar power, we moved from zero megawatts in 2011, to 82.12 in 2022.”

“I invite governments, international organisations, private sector operators, philanthropic organisations and others to join us in these and other efforts towards a world resilient and adapted to climate change, looking at Africa as a continent that is in more need,” the president concluded.

Source: Lusa / UN Media