The Role of Climate-Forest Interface in Climate Resilient Green Economy of Ethiopia

Abstract

It is time for courageous collective effort to reduce the rate of climate change to the level that occurs naturally and to design mechanism to handle the effect of climate change. 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 and forest matters to the climate resilient green economy of Ethiopia. Different researchers explain that, Ethiopia has lost a cumulative level of over 13 % of its current 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.The government of Ethiopia therefore recognizes the importance of designing development policies with a view to climate change. In Ethiopia building the green economy is considered as necessity as well as an opportunity. In relation to CRGE become the timely slogan of Ethiopia which aims to stabilise its net greenhouse gas emission while building resilience to against current climate risks and future climate change.There are controversies among the risk in a changing climate, demand for economic development, reduction of agricultural productivity, and natural resource. So, CRGE approach follows the principle of harmonizing the controversies. But the efforts so far have done on  climate and forest development are facing some challenges by population growth, high dependency of national energy on fuel wood, lack of good governance, lack of capacity to deliver core development services, complex agro-ecological zones, changing growing seasons, lack of real public policy discussion on the climate and policy contradiction like investment and settlement policy. Solving these challenges is very important to achieve the CRGE strategy of Ethiopia.

Keywords: Climate, Climate Resilient, Development,  Forest, Green Economy, and Interface