Mercy's mission to Poland

Mercy Chirambo is a Malawian climate change campaigner. As a Programme Officer for Catholic Development Commission (CADECOM) National, she works with the CCPM to ensure that communities we work with have a voice in Malawian politics and their concerns about climate change are heard.

She’s in Poland for the 24th United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of Parties (COP) on climate change to carry the voice of the CCPM communities to a global stage, and make world leaders listen to those most affected by climate change which she's blogged about below.

Climate change is impacting on many Malawians’ human rights, -undercutting their right to health, food, safe drinking water, self-determination and privacy and adequate standards of living. The poor and vulnerable households in the communities are the first to be affected by climate change, and suffer the worst, despite doing little to cause the problem.

Although the country has developed several climate change policy frameworks, lack of funding has limited the implementation of such policies to effect change. I believe rich countries should financially support Malawi in building the adaptive capacity of the vulnerable populations who are affected the worst by climate change, yet do little to contribute to the climate change challenge.

The CCPM, is contributing to lessening the climate change burden on the vulnerable communities in Malawi. Under the policy adaptation and mitigation frameworks, Malawi aims at increasing climate resilience, improve food security, increase adaptive capacity of the vulnerable people, restore degraded ecosystems and landscapes, improve land use and deploy climate-resilient agriculture, renewable energy.

I’ve come to Poland because I want to see world leaders commit to making more resources available to developing countries like Malawi. So that we can work on capacity building and technology transfer so ensure we can mitigate and adapt to the worst of climate change.