**Author details**

*Global Warming and Climate Change*

**7. Conclusion**

the Zimbabwean communities.

other opportunities that it offers.

rural district councils (RDCs) and health institutions, for example through funding,

Overall, although a range of benefits are evident in the broad socio-economic development sectors of the country, much still needs to be done to enhance the sustainability trajectory of climate change responses. Most of the interventions discussed here have mainly been spearheaded by the external driven initiatives, mainly in terms of policy direction and funding. The main reasons for an external driven orientation relate largely to the macro-economic problems that the country has been facing over the past two decades and partly to the heterogeneous acknowledgement of climate change as a development priority on the policy and institutional front.

From the analysis given in this article, Zimbabwe, like many developing countries, faces climate change in its main socio-economic development sectors. Although the article only concentrated on the agriculture, water, energy and health sectors to show climate change impacts and the country's responses to the climate agenda, it is proper to conclude that climate change brings mixed experiences that need to be carefully studied. The study challenges the current discourse that have tended to project climate change as a development hindrance. Instead, the article revealed several development opportunities that exist. If these opportunities are carefully considered, government, communities and individuals will be able to take advantage of the climate change phenomena to reshape the development trajectory. At the policy front, climate change has intensified policy formulation whose benefits go beyond environmental to cover co-benefits in the broad socio-economic development sectors. This has unlocked investment opportunities in clean energy and the associated health benefits, improved energy access, improved energy security particularly in remote and newly developed settlements, access to portable water, expansion of irrigation facilities, climate-sensitive budgeting, improved agriculture production, and improved food security. Essentially, most of the

climatic interventions associated with these benefits have also managed to articulate cross-cutting issues of gender, poverty and marginalised groups. In the context of the energy sector, communities that are otherwise far from the grid could benefit as they get closely connected to the world through off-grid energy systems, modern communications and information technology. Clearly, the climate response regime that Zimbabwe embraces has opened up several avenues for addressing poverty. However, these benefits are not evenly experienced but tend to be isolated across

The sustainability question on whether the current and anticipated benefits of climate change responses can be guaranteed to continue accruing to individuals, institutions and the country at large has been investigated. One way of making climatic responses sustainable would be to leverage the current predominantly external funding to get the necessary knowledge and best practices implemented to inform necessary government budgetary allocations that is supported by climatesensitive development plans and policies. The government should depart from external funding but promote blended financing approach to allow for ownership and enhance impact investment by all players. Essentially, benefits of responding to climate change are only fully realised when the country embraces both mitigation and adaptation practices in its response decision mix. Mitigation should not only be understood as concerned with cutting carbon emissions but should be designed to take advantage of technological advances in renewable energy, for example, among

the health system can be strengthened to address climatic challenges.

**52**

Nelson Chanza1 \* and Veronica Gundu-Jakarasi<sup>2</sup>

1 Department of Geography, Bindura University of Science Education, Bindura, Zimbabwe

2 Infrastructural Development Bank of Zimbabwe (IDBZ), Harare, Zimbabwe

\*Address all correspondence to: nchanza@gmail.com

© 2020 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
