Today’s Planet Earth: Our Loving Home will be presented in Kamtok (Cameroonian Pidgin), with subtitles in Arabic, Aulacese (Vietnamese), Chinese, English, French, German, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Malay, Mongolian, Persian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Thai.

Halo, green-conscious viewers, and welcome to this week’s edition of Planet Earth: Our Loving Home featuring the impact of climate change on the Central African nation of Cameroon.

As in other countries around the world, warning signs that our planet is seriously out of balance are appearing in Cameroon, and if a fast-approaching tipping point is passed, we will all face runaway global warming. One such frightening sign is Lake Chad, previously Africa’s fourth-largest lake, which has shrunk 90% in size over the past 40 years.

Dr. Yinda Godwill, Environmental Science program co-coordinator at the University of Buea in Buea, the capital of Cameroon’s Southwest Region, is deeply concerned that climate change is quickly making his homeland a place far different than the one he once knew.

The theory that we have about global warming, effects in Cameroon is that due to global warming, there will be more water evaporating from the sea and that water moves from the sea and rises up through the Cameroon mountain region and cools down there in the clouds and falls down as rain.

Up in the north, the waters in Lake Chad, and other waters that are up in the north would also be evaporating faster than they used to and more water will go up into the atmosphere. Now, what happens is this: Water, when it’s in the atmosphere, tries to find itself so water vapor will move to where there is more water vapor.

So, you find out that in Cameroon, in the places where we used to have more rainfall, like in the Southwest here, like in Buea, there is a lot of rainfall, rain falls for a longer periods. This year we’ve had rain still falling in December, which was something that did not use to be. By October’s end the rain used to finish. We did not have rain again, maybe one little shower in December, but we’ve had rain falling continuously up till now.

As we’re talking now, rain clouds are building up, they might fall. And this is not normal; it’s not normal. The amount of rainfall is increasing. So, the drier places are getting drier and the wetter places are getting wetter.

And what are the implications of this in terms of agricultural productivity, in terms of the economy, in terms of lifestyle in general?

Because of global climate change, Lake Chad basin, Lake Chad has reduced to a very small volume and it’s threatening to even disappear. And that is affecting their way of life up there; those who were up there doing farming along that area because the fertility of that place and the water that was there are not operating at maximum (capacity), because the climate has changed. That’s how it’s affecting us.

Ni John Fru Ndi, founder and chairman of Cameroon’s Social Democratic Front Party is also disturbed by how his nation is fundamentally changing due to the rapidly heating planet.

Well, you see for yourself that rains are falling in Cameroon now more than they have ever fallen before. You see that there are landslides; there are floods in Victoria, getting across to Douala and I was told the other day over the BBC that there were floods in Burkina Faso right in the center towards the desert. So, you see that this global warming is affecting the people.

The Congo Basin, with its 180-million hectares of rainforest, is vitally important in stabilizing Earth’s climate. A 2007 report by the UK-based Rainforest Foundation summed up the dangers of losing this precious resource as follows: “Deforestation within Central Africa could result in large-scale climate effects, changing temperatures, the distribution of rainfall and climate variability in distant parts of the world.”

Cameroon happens to share one of the two biggest forest zones in the world; we have the Amazon Basin and we have the Congo Basin and part of the Congo Basin forest is in Cameroon. And, if we want to join in the solution to the global warming problem, we must do our best to help keep our forests together.

We must stop deforestation, we must protect the forest, so that it remains the carbon-absorbing part of the world which it is. Because these two areas, if they’re destroyed, the Amazon and the Congo Basin, then we’re finished because there is nothing else that will help us remove the carbon from the atmosphere like the forest.

Globally, malaria causes approximately one-million deaths a year, with 90% of the victims being from Sub-Saharan Africa. The World Health Organization states that in this region malaria is the number-one cause of death for children under five and the reason for 30 to 50% of inpatient hospital admissions. Scientists fear that with rising temperatures, the disease will spread more easily as the malaria-causing parasite needs warm weather to develop.

Malaria is transmitted by the Anopheles mosquito and this mosquito lives in warm areas. So, you used to find malaria around the Southwest, Littoral, Southern Provinces and Central Province; that’s where you used to find malaria. The savannah didn’t used to have malaria at all. I remember when I was still young, when we were in Bamenda, we didn’t know about malaria.

But over time now the malaria zone has increased so much that you even have malaria in Ngaoundéré, the middle of the country. The malaria zone has become so huge and it’s because of this global warming making the zone where mosquitoes can survive larger. So that’s how it’s affecting us and it’s becoming a problem that a lot money, energy, education, etc. is being put into.

The practice of intensive animal agriculture is the number-one source of human-induced methane and nitrous oxide, and thus the primary driver of climate change. Averaged over a 20-year period, these highly dangerous greenhouse gases have 72 and nearly 300 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide respectively.

And as these gases are relatively “short-lived” and leave the atmosphere much more quickly than the thousand years required for carbon dioxide, any solution to climate change must begin with reducing the production and consumption of animal products.

If people switch to a vegetarian diet and abstain from meat consumption, this will discourage people from producing meat and then it’s an effective way of combating global warming. What is your comment on this ?

Yes. If people switch to a vegetarian diet it will actually cool down the market for these animal products. It’s a fact that a vegetarian diet is better. It’s better; it’s more healthy than a diet of meat, fish.

Organic vegan farming is another way to help mitigate climate change, as the use of chemical fertilizers such as synthetic nitrogen produces large quantities of atmospheric nitrous oxide and creates oceanic dead zones when the poisonous chemicals are washed by rainfall into waterways.

In one of the longest studies ever conducted on organic farming practices, the US-based Rodale Institute found that organic soil management not only minimizes fossil fuel use, but can also reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide by up to 40% by acting as a carbon sink.

Organic farming, for those who don’t understand what organic farming is, it just means that you’re farming without using any inorganic additions into your farm. This is the traditional way that our parents used to farm.

So organic farming becomes very important because you harvest your crop, whether it’s the roots, whether it’s the leaves, whether it’s the fruits, and then the rest of the plant you put back to the soil. You put it back to the soil with all the nutrients that it has taken from the soil; and it returns it back to the soil. And so you can use that piece of land over and over and over again without taking too much out.

Yes, I am Njitah Wilson, the principal of PSS (the Presbyterian Secondary School) Bafut. I have been principal of this school for four years.

We are doing organic farming; we use compost manure, our compost is large. When we clear the grass, we form compost and then we use in growing plantains. When the students are in school, we eat plantains as one of the meals so we harvest the plantains for the students, and during holidays we harvest the plantains for the teachers. And so it is a source of food to us.

So, why have you decided not to use fertilizers in the farm?

Oh, it’s going to destroy the environment. And plantains grown with fertilizer do not taste good.

In what ways is the farm helping to protect the environment?

Before we grew the plantains, there was a lot of erosion. And now with the plantains in that farm, the roots are helping to protect the soil and so the topsoil is not washed away by erosion. If you go to the farm, you’ll actually see how green the farm is. And we were taught in school that the leaves of the plants convert nutrients or convert carbon dioxide to usable material by the plants. So, it’s actually fighting global warming by using the leaves.

We close today’s program with a few words from Dr. Godwill for his fellow citizens.

If I have to give a message to Cameroonians it is to tell them that they should not think that global warming is too far away, that global warming is affecting only those in the developed countries. They should not see themselves as being far away from that problem. The problem is here, the problem is ours and we should be part of the solution.

We sincerely thank Dr. Yinda Godwill, Chairman Ni John Fru Ndi and Principal Njitah Wilson for informing others in their community about climate change and for promoting better treatment of our precious Mother Earth. May humankind now take quick action to cool our planet by quickly adopting the organic vegan diet.

For more information on these organizations, please visit the following websites
Social Democratic Front Party (Ni John Fru Ndi) www.SDFParty.org
Presbyterian Secondary School Bafut (Njitah Wilson) www.PSSBafut.com
University of Buea (Dr. Yinda Godwill) www.UBuea.net

Thank you for your kind company on Planet Earth: Our Loving Home. Up next is Enlightening Entertainment after Noteworthy News. Let us all join hands to create a brighter tomorrow.