Cyclone Highlights Need for Paradigm Shift

A few weeks ago, a tropical cyclone named Idai made landfall in the coastal Mozambican city of Beira, with 100 mph winds, driving rains, and surging seas, destroying or damaging 90 percent of all structures. Across the country, the wind and flooding have so far displaced 127,500 people and killed more than 500.

The storm could not have been worse for a nation so heavily reliant on agriculture, arriving in time to destroy almost 2,000 square miles of crops right before expected harvests. The resulting food insecurity is just one of many long-term challenges stemming from the storm. Cholera and other health impacts are rapidly rising and will worsen during the many months of repairs to infrastructure and restoring services to millions already living in extreme poverty.

With a history of coastal cyclones, Mozambique did not need a reminder of its vulnerability. Just last year Beira completed the first phase of a $120 million project with the World Bank to update drainage systems along the main river to reduce damaging flooding that regularly affects residents. And yet, even that wasn’t enough in the face of the new reality so many highly vulnerable coastal cities now face. The climate of the past is no longer a reliable metric for a future of increasingly extreme weather. Indeed, Cyclone Idai was one of the strongest tropical storms ever in the southern hemisphere.

Decades of exploiting Mozambique’s considerable resource wealth have in many ways worsened the impacts of such storms. The country’s natural capital — forests, reefs, wetlands, and the wildlife that inhabit them — provides an enormous bounty for local livelihoods and the national economy.

I arrived in-country just after the cyclone. I saw first-hand how important this resource wealth is to local communities beyond the reach of national infrastructure and services, where people’s livelihoods are entirely dependent on nature. They need charcoal for cooking from forests, fish in lakes and ponds, and cassava and lettuce produced from poor, sandy soils with scarce dollops of fertilizer. It is also where incredible biodiversity shows the promise of a tourism-based economy. Our group stumbled upon a migrating pod of humpback whales feeding in the nutrient-rich channel between Mozambique and Madagascar.

This natural capital also provides critical benefits that can increase resilience to the impacts and risks of a warming planet. Mangroves and coral reefs provide natural defenses against storm surges, slowing deadly wave energy. Forests and wetlands act like a sponge, absorbing and slowing flood waters. Unfortunately, these systems are being wiped out across Mozambique, as people expand agriculture and urban frontiers and more of the country’s natural wealth is opened to commercial exploitation. While forests still cover a little less than half the country, approximately 1,000 soccer fields of forests are lost every day — totaling an area equal to the size of Germany just since 1980.

With huge potential income from resource extraction and exploitation — more than $100 billion alone in revenue is expected from natural gas reserves off the coast of Cabo Delgado in the north — it is not surprising protection of these natural assets is losing out. To reverse this trend and better balance development moving forward, World Wildlife Fund is working with the government of Mozambique to explicitly address one of the most important reasons why natural capital is not being as well protected as it should be. There are insufficient data, information, and analysis on the country’s important resource assets and how they contribute to community livelihoods, support the national economy — and help people adapt to the growing impacts of an increasingly extreme climate.

What we have been doing is to work with the Mozambican government to implement its Green Economy Roadmap. The 2012 document enshrines sustainable development as official government policy. Since then, we have been working through an interministerial Natural Capital Program to develop critically needed maps that identify where nature provides the most important benefits for local communities and the larger economy, both monetary and otherwise.

As you read this, Mozambicans are working hard to incorporate this information into the national territorial development plan that organizes the next five years of economic expansion. Only with this information in the hands of government decisionmakers can we shift the resource paradigm toward greater sustainability and resilience and meet the Sustainable Development Goals and the commitments of the Paris Agreement.