MSF Prioritizes Carbon Print Reduction in its Response to Health Needs

By Okech Francis

A solar panel field spans three quarters of an acre at Malakal Teaching Hospital with a 750kba capacity to run the pediatric facility across the street.

While ably keeping the cold chain rooms and neonatal units fully powered and increasing the quality of health provision at Malakal Children’s Hospital, the idea of Medecins Sans Frontieres behind the solar power project is tagged to the global non-fossil energy drive and its carbon print reduction policy. The solar project will also provide power to MSF offices in Malakal.

“The solar project is geared to ensure that the children hospital in Malakal is provided with sufficient power to run the hospital, and as well the office in Malakal,” Dr Dominic Mwonga, MSF Emergency Coordinator in Malakal town told The Dawn in an interview. “It will also reduce the dependence on fossil fuel and that also will have an impact on the carbon footprint of MSF activities in the country,” he said. It will as well solve the fuel challenges in this area where we face a lot of challenges in transportation of fuel.”

According to Mwonga, MSF is working internationally on a policy to reduce the carbon print of its activities in programing. That policy aims to reduce carbon emission by 50 percent in its global programing by 2030.

The charity already warned that human-caused environmental disruption is having dramatic impacts on the health and wellbeing of people around the world and that unless urgent and large-scale mitigation measures are taken, people’s health will increasingly suffer because of the climate emergency.

The emergencies include extreme weather events and changing patterns that fuel the spread of deadly diseases like malaria, dengue, and cholera, it said. Indirectly, droughts, floods, insect plagues, and changing rainfall patterns can jeopardize food production and people’s means of survival.

MSF said the climate emergency is causing an intensification of such calamitous events, both in severity and frequency hitting hard on settings like Malakal where people already lack access to, or are excluded from, basic healthcare. Malakal and its surrounding, just like most parts of South Sudan is already flood prone. Its people are part of those least responsible for the emissions that generate climate change.