Zimbabwe Country Climate and Development Report

Zimbabwe is a lower middle-income country with abundant natural capital and growth potential, but is highly exposed to climate change, with its immediate ability to address climate challenges severely constrained. People in Zimbabwe are increasingly reliant on successive rounds of emergency relief rather than a formal government safety net. Macroeconomic constraints, deindustrialization, and land reform have combined to increase dependency on agricultural livelihoods and push up emissions from land use change. The macroeconomic constraints pose a double bind in which the inability to finance development, climate adaptation, and mitigation is leading to increased land degradation, higher net emissions, and less resilience. This Country Climate and Development Report (CCDR) identifies a path out of this double bind by linking demand from global green value chains to Zimbabwe’s significant reserves of energy transition minerals (ETMs), such as lithium needed for electric vehicles, in a way that: (i) enables public and private sectors to invest in resilient low-carbon development; (ii) finances capital accumulation that could be deployed to support at-scale land restoration and increases agricultural productivity; and (iii) expands resilience-building social safety nets to protect the most vulnerable, helping them adapt to the expected increase in cyclical weather shocks.