Caritas Zambia urges swift implementation of climate funds to address plight of rural majority

Caritas Zambia has urged the government to swiftly and transparently implement the national climate funds and policies, ensuring resources reach the grassroots where reported suffering was greatest. The Catholic organisation has also called on the cooperating partners, to ensure climate justice, funding that comes not as high-interest loans that deepen the country’s debt, but as grants to help mitigate a crisis it did not create. In a statement issued in Lusaka on Friday to commemorate World Environment Day, Caritas Zambia Executive Director, Father Dr.

Gabriel Mapulanga, noted that green growth could not just be an economic policy but it should be an ecological conversion. Mapulanga said this year’s national theme, “Accelerating Zambia’s Climate Action for Green Growth and Sustainability”, was a timely answer to the moral imperative. He argued that poor Zambians did not have the resources to adapt to the climate chaos they did the least to cause.

“Therefore, any true ecological approach must always become a social approach, it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to hear both the cry of the earth and the cry of the poor,” Mapulanga said. He emphasized that true green growth required a shift from an economy based on short-term exploitation to one based on long-term stewardship. Mapulanga said as the country exploited its mineral wealth—such as the copper needed globally for the green energy transition, there was need to ensure strict environmental safeguards.

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“Green growth means our local communities must not inherit polluted waters and degraded lands while the wealth flows elsewhere,” he said. Mapulanga stressed the need to accelerate support for climate-smart, sustainable agriculture especially that smallholder farmers need rapid access to drought-tolerant seed varieties, agroforestry techniques, and solar-powered irrigation. He said by protecting the soil and biodiversity, the country could cure the earth while feeding the poor.

“Zambia’s current energy crisis highlights our vulnerability. Accelerating climate action means aggressively diversifying into solar, wind, and sustainable biogas,” Mapulanga added. He cautioned that the transition should be decentralized so that the poorest rural health centers and schools would be the first to be energized, ensuring no one was left behind in the dark. This material, and other digital content on this website, may not be reproduced, published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed in whole or in part without prior express permission from ZAMBIA MONITOR.

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