The Role of Climate–Forest–Agriculture Interface in Climate Resilient Green Economy of Ethiopia

Abstract

Though the problem of climate change is global its effect on the developing countries like Ethiopia are very significant, because of less capacity to reduce and reverse the problem. Ethiopia has always suffered from great climatic variability; that causes for various socio-economic and environmental problems. This review paper examines why and how climate, forest, and agriculture interfaces matters to the climate resilient green economy of Ethiopia. Different researchers explain that, Ethiopia has lost accumulative level of over 13% of its agricultural output between 1991 and 2010. And if no adaptation measures are taken, climate change may reduce Ethiopia's GDP by up to 10% by 2045. Considering this the government of Ethiopia is working to build green economy development policies with a view to climate change, which is considered as necessity as well as an opportunity ,but there are controversies among the risk in a changing climate, demand for economic development, reduction of agricultural productivity, and natural resource. So, Climate Resilient Green Economy (CRGE) approach needs to follows the principle of harmonizing these controversies. The highest bases of Ethiopian economy and source of energy are agriculture and forests respectively, plus to this both sectors are source of more than 80% Green House Gas (GHG) emission in the country. Therefore CRGE strategy which based mainly on agriculture and forest developmental policy is very important but the efforts so far have done on the two sectors are facing some challenges due to the strong interferences among Climate-Forest-Agriculture and related factors such as population growth, high dependency of national energy on fuel wood, lack of good governance, changing growing seasons, lack of real public policy discussion and policy contradiction like investment and settlement. Therefore taking in to account the role of climate, forest and agriculture interfaces in the effort to build Climate Resilient Green Economy and solving the related challenges is very important to achieve the CRGE strategy of Ethiopia.