First of all, in the case of Sahelian countries, especially those of Western Africa, people are fully aware of climate change. They experience daily the effects of climate change and they adapt because climate fluctuations from one year to the next have become very frequent.
This year, winter rains came six weeks late. Cotton was supposed to be grown in a number of fields but the people, knowing that cultivated cotton is a hybrid that cannot adjust to climate, preferred planting local grains. These are photosensitive and photoperiodic and can adjust to the duration of winter rains. Adaptations are happening daily and people are perfectly aware because they are directly affected. Floods used to be rare in the Sahel, but this year there have been over 34 serious floods in Mali which affected 40,000 people. So it is true that climate change is here, it is experienced and understood by the people of the Sahel.
At the same time, here is the position of our governments. There is an obvious political will. Mali, for example, ratified the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change on December 28, 2004 although it took effect only in March of the same year. This means that the country was indeed very quick to ratify the convention, but government capacity remains weak, there are few forecasting studies under way to try to anticipate the climate and the required adaptations and we know that in order to adapt we need knowledge of climatic trends.
Canada could contribute a lot in this regard also, but all this needs to be based on the traditional system of resilience and what people already know, rather than reinventing the wheel. We must build on what exists in order for the peasants who have the needs to take ownership of the measures. We are talking here about 80 percent of the population. When we help 80 percent of the population to mitigate the effects of climate change in their daily lives and to realize their potential this can be called combatting poverty.