Kenyan civil society and lawmakers said on Tuesday Africa should have a unified position ahead of the climate change conference in Copenhagen in Denmark to be held later this year.

Speaking in Nairobi, Kenya Climate Change Working Group Convenor Susy Wandera said the continent now needed a better deal at the upcoming Conference of the Parties (COP) 2009 on Climate Change slated for December.

"Africa has only about three percent of the CDM (Clean Development Mechanism) projects. What we want now is funding in the adaptation fund and we don't want donor institutions like the World Bank to control those funds," she told journalists in Nairobi.

Wandera expressed fear that if the donor agencies controlled the funds, they would create obstacles and the intended recipients of the money; in this case the communities would not receive it.

She said African governments will speak with one voice at the Conference of the Parties (COP) 2009.

Kenyan educationist and Member of Parliament who is also the vice president for the Pan African Parliamentary Network for climate change responsible for East Africa, Prof. Margaret Kamar, has been bestowed the task of coordinating the efforts to ensure the Africans spoke in an accordant voice at the conference.

The conference, which is a follow-up of COP 2006, will discuss among other issues, mechanisms of ensuring that countries met existing obligations and made further commitments to fulfilling the core aim of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; that of preventing anthropogenic climate change.

"Development in the West has contributed immensely to global warming in the rest of the world with the resultant effect of increased poverty in the developing countries due to the latter's limited capacity and coping strategies to persevere through the changing circumstances," said the convener of the symposium, Paul Mbole.

He said the West should bear the responsibility of global warming because it was their emissions that had caused global warming and should therefore play a part in helping the less developed countries to cope with their change of lifestyle.

"The burdens of climate change are not of our own making. With little more than 15 percent of the world's population, the countries of Africa together contribute less than four percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. It is the excessive emissions of the world's wealthy that have contributed most to the causes of climate change," said Mbole.

Climate change is increasingly having disastrous effects on vulnerable communities in Kenya. The rains have failed yet again resulting in more than 10 million Kenyans going hungry. Rivers, dams and lakes are drying up, causing severe water and energy crisis.

Floods, famine, droughts and diseases are on the rise with agriculture, tourism and the economy threatened.

(Xinhua News Agency July 15, 2009)