The curtains have been drawn upon the Africa Climate Summit; will this be another edition of talk and no action on matters climate change?
For the past week or so, Kenya’s capital, Nairobi was awash with foreign dignitaries, various stakeholders, and many other interested parties attending the Africa Climate Summit. The country played the host to the inaugural climate summit, a first of its kind in the continent. The summit was meant to build on the momentum from COP 27 which was held towards the end of 2022 in Sharam El-Sheikh, Egypt. The Summit also went a long way towards preparing the conversation on the African perspective on Climate change as COP 28 fast approaches.
COP refers to the United Nations Climate Change Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC or the Conference of Parties for short. UNFCCC on the other hand refers to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, an international treaty that was established during the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. The treaty aims to combat dangerous human interference with the climate system; in part by stabilizing greenhouse concentrations in the atmosphere. The treaty sets out to hold annual conventions and conferences to brainstorm solutions to combat and curtail climate change with the COP being the primal decision-making body of the UNFCCC.
The conventions have resulted in a couple of important agreements and frameworks being drafted to address the issue of climate change; which in turn condition the countries to reduce emissions and contribute less towards global warming on an individual level. Some of these crucial agreements include the Kyoto Protocol of 1997 and the Paris Climate Accords of 2015.
The inaugural edition of the Africa Climate Summit (ACS) was set up, in part, as a response to the COP summit which is held at a global level. The ACS was meant to be an avenue for the continental pooling of ideas to address the debacle surrounding the issue of climate change. Africa has long been the most affected corner of the world by the adverse effects of climate change despite being its least contributant.
Nonetheless, the summit provided a chance for Africa to raise a concerted voice to the developed world to deliver on its promise to reduce its contribution to climate change and to deliver on its promise to give $100 Billion annually to facilitate global climate financing by 2025. The summit was also a platform for coagulation of ideas for the adoption of green and renewable energy from governments, NGOs, civil societies as well as the African youth.
All in all, the summit was Africa’s way of standing up to the developed world in the matters of climate change, incentivizing it to take up more responsibility for its contribution towards global warming. Furthermore, the summit was a way of finding African solutions to resolving the debacle of climate change.
Looking beyond the Africa Climate Summit, one cannot beg but ask the question, are these conventions effective in any way in achieving what they set out to do? Take the Conference of Parties for example. The convention has been held annually since 1995 except for 2020 due to the pandemic. These annual talks are meant to generate discourse and encourage collective decision-making on the various issues of climate change. However, progress as a result of these talks has been slower than anticipated given that parties are slow to implement the decisions arrived at in these conventions.
The Paris Agreements arrived at during COP 21 were only arrived at after more than 20 years of negotiations and even then, countries such as the USA pulled out of the agreements hence derailing progress from the talks. Many of the provisions from this agreement are yet to be fully implemented especially in the major developed countries which also happen to be the biggest contributants towards pollution.
Financing on climate issues has also proven to be an increasingly cagey affair as the allocation of funds towards climate programs remains little if any. The budgets for many of the developed countries are directed toward other sectors of spending that are considered to be ‘more important’, such as defense and social sector spending.
Back to the Africa Climate Summit. The platform provided a fresh outlook on climate change from an African perspective. Climate change has long been considered a ‘problem of the developed world’ given that the biggest polluters are also the most advanced nations. However, the evidence for the same seems to suggest otherwise. Climate change is felt adversely in Africa nonetheless. The changes in global weather patterns as a result of climate change have affected agricultural production in the continent.
Extreme weather patterns such as droughts and flooding also affect agriculture in addition to ravaging the established way of life for many living on the continent. For a continent that was already grappling with acute food insecurity, climate change has managed to make the situation worse.
Despite being among the lowest producers of industrial pollution, Africa is home to 5 of the world’s top 10 most polluted nations in the realm of air pollution. This pollution occurs as a result of household air pollution which emanates from the continued use of solid fuels such as wood, coal, and charcoal in many African households, which exposes many to harmful pollutants, increasing the risk of contracting various respiratory illnesses.
Consequently, these findings retaliate the need for the adoption of clean energy for the continent and that pollution is very much an African problem as well. The African Climate Summit was, therefore, a tool for the continent to make a stand for itself; piling pressure on the necessary parties to act accordingly and work to reverse the effects of climate change change. The big question, however, is whether these efforts will be effective.
COP 27, or the ‘African COP’ should provide some insights on the matter. Firstly, the fact it has taken 27 conventions for the conversation to be held on African soil goes to show how long it has taken for the continent to be included and involved in resolving the issue of climate change. The convention also went to show just how much these conventions are influenced by global geo-political events.
COP 27 was overshadowed by Russia’s war in Ukraine and how that had stretched the energy resources in European nations which had grown dependent on cheap Russian gas. Many of these nations had since switched back to the use of their domestic fuel reserves hence derailing progress to move away from fossil fuels as well as acting on carbon reduction.
Consequently, the convention was hijacked by the major users of these fuels, who sought to find ways to circumvent the various commitments towards moving away from these fuels, undoing much of the effort put in previous conventions.
However, the biggest elephant in the room remains trust between parties and the issue of climate justice. Whose fault is it for the current state of affairs and who is meant to bear responsibility for fixing the mess? In other words, who bears responsibility for initiating and funding these climate programs?
The issue is compounded by the fact that International Diplomacy is conducted with the logical involvement and participation of all those involved. There is no oversight authority forcibly pushing everyone to act accordingly. These happen to be agreements after all and no party should be forcibly obliged to act.
The provision of funds for these climate programs is influenced solely by the motivation of the concerned parties toward the climate debacle. There exists no legal framework that obliges the parties to contribute towards climate financing.
Negotiations for setting up a fund for climate finance to the tune of about $100 Billion annually have been undertaken since 2009 with little success. The fund should cover loss and damages from the abandonment of non-green energy, adaptations as well as the uptake for a rapid ramp-up of renewables. The biggest question and hold up for the fund, however, is who is going to pay for it, how large the funding stream will be and more crucially, who controls and manages the funds.
Negotiations on the Africa Climate Summit once again exposed the overdependence on the developed nations to provide funding as the only way to resolve the debacle, despite the problem being very much an African one as well.
Trust is the most important ingredient for the success of any agreement. The situation should be no different for the Conference of Parties. Each party comes to the negotiating table with its own set of agenda and policies that, many times, it is not willing to compromise on. consequently, negotiations break down fast and the whole event becomes a merry-go-round. All in all, despite 28 years of negotiations, a lot of what was set out to be achieved during the Rio Earth Summit back in 1992 has yet to be achieved even today.
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