Fragilecologies Archives
2 March 2005
A couple of years ago an organization called GLOBE Southern Africa (in Cape Town, South Africa ) prepared a report called Climate Change in Africa. GLOBE stands for Global Legislators Organization for a Balanced Environment. It notes that it is an organization “founded in 1989 with the express aim of enhancing global cooperation between parliamentarians on environmental and sustainable development issues. Its world-wide membership includes over 800 parliamentarians in over 100 countries.”
Most of the articles in the report were written by Africans and for Africans. In the following paragraphs I am presenting the parts of the report that were singled out by the editor for special attention. These are highlighted quotes that summarized the key messages of the writers. Following each quote I provide a few sentences to discuss their meaning from my view.
• Humans have already increased the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere by more than 30% since the beginning of the industrial revolution and the large-scale use of fossil fuels.
This statement refers to the fact that with the Industrial Revolution that began in the middle of the 1700s there was a sharp increase in burning coal, which produces carbon dioxide, called a greenhouse gas. As a greenhouse gas it helps to heat up the air and therefore increase global climate temperatures. This is called the greenhouse effect. What the burning of coal, oil and natural gas to keep industries operating and homes heated or cooled does is to increase global temperatures beyond what normal climate conditions would be.
The report also noted “20% of the world’s population cannot continue to indiscriminately pollute the atmosphere at the expense of the majority”. It is well known that the industrialized countries are the ones that saturated the atmosphere with a lot of greenhouse gases. This saturation runs the risk of heating up the global temperatures to such an extent that rainfall patterns will change: more droughts in some places, more floods in others, more forest and bush fires and heat waves. All inhabitants of the planet will suffer because of the activities of a few affluent countries. Shouldn’t those countries that saturated the atmosphere with greenhouse gases take the first steps to reduce them?
• Africa’s contribution to the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases has been minimal, yet according to the IPCC, Africa is the most vulnerable continent to climate change as widespread poverty severely limits its capabilities to adapt.
The rich industrialized countries have been putting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere for a couple of hundred years. You can say that their burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil and natural gas) enabled the developed countries of the Northern Hemisphere to become rich and industrial. African production of greenhouse gases has been relatively small and what it does produce is the result of trying to fulfill its basic needs. It is also clear that Africans are relatively poor and they have relatively few resources to cope with the possible bad impacts of climate change on water, food production, human health and other climate-related problems. Africans did not cause the global warming problem that exists today and therefore they deserve help from those countries that did so that they can better cope with global warming’s negative impacts.
• On the demand side, the most compelling demand for electricity does not seem to come from productive agents [factories] but from households seeking to light the home or communities requiring a decent water supply, means of storing essential medicines, and extended study hours for those in educationÖ
This statement draws attention to the fact that many Africans are struggling to meet their basic needs for food, water, basic energy needs to pump water from wells, to keep medicines and foods refrigerated, for electricity to light up their homes and communities, and so forth. While people in the rich countries decide which gas-consuming cars to buy, Africans are seeking firewood and charcoal to cook their meals. This does not seem very equitable, does it?
Daily trek for water. Ethiopia (photo M.H. Glantz)
• New York uses more gasoline in a week than the whole of Africa does in a year.
This statement draws attention to the lack of equal conditions in the international community. People in developed countries are using many more resources per person than those in the tropical countries. They use more energy, eat more food, consume more clean water, and have considerably more access to life-saving medicines and more protected personal rights than do many of those on the African continent.
Reinforcing this point, the GLOBE report on Climate Change in Africa noted the following inequities: “There are more cars in Westphalia, Germany, than in the whole of Africa. The US State of Texas alone, with a population of 30 million, emits more CO2 than 93 developing countries added together, with a combined population of nearly one billion people, and nearly three times more CO2 than Brazil” (ECO publication, November 1998).
Such major disparities must be exposed, dealt with and corrected, not with just words and international declarations of desired goals, but with actions.
• Developed countries should therefore understand that the CDM should not only be an instrument for emissions reduction at least cost, but also an access to sustainable development for developing countries.
The CDM is the Clean Development Mechanism and it refers to the transfer of technologies that reduces greenhouses gas emissions into the air. These new technologies being developed by the rich countries of the Northern Hemisphere, from the United States and Canada to Japan and Korea, should give African countries a chance to get on a path of sustainable development. This means that people today will use their natural resources in a way that leaves them in good condition for the next generations of Africans to use. Rich countries want to sell their clean technologies but African countries cannot afford them.
• Africa being the most underdeveloped continent does not have opportunities for emissions reduction but certainly does for avoidance of future emissions.
If the rich industrialized countries follow through on their pledges to provide clean technologies to African countries, then there would be a reduction in future emissions of greenhouse gases into the air and would therefore lower the likelihood of large increases in temperature.
• The uncertainty in data, methodologies or operation of mechanisms is, however, no excuse for Africa to lie dormant while the rest of the world searches for solutions.
Not everyone believes that the global temperatures are increasing because of the burning of coal and other fossil fuels. They do not believe that humans have the ability to change the global temperature. It is easy for a government to decide to do nothing about global warming until all of the doubts about climate change are removed.
There will always be uncertainty and it should not be used as a reason for a government to do nothing to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. Most governments around the world (except the United States — the biggest producer of greenhouse gases, and Australia) are concerned about global warming and its likely impacts (more droughts in some places, more floods in others, new diseases appearing in places they had not existed before, increase in climate-related hazards, more intense and longer lasting heat waves, and so on). African governments need to deal with the global warming issue along with the other crises they are facing from day to day and year to year.
• The negative impacts of climate change will be felt in Africa a long time before the positive impacts of emission reductions are manifest — as such adaptation is a priority for Africa.
Many years from now scientists will look back to decide if a specific drought, flood, fire or disease outbreak was actually caused by global warming. In the meantime African farmers, water managers, health specialists and disaster managers will continue to make adjustments to seasonal changes that will be occurring even under normal if not changing conditions. To their credit they have been responding to climate variability from season to season and year to year for thousands of years. The climate is always changing. The farmers and herders are always adjusting.
In summary, it is very clear to me that the rich countries that have industrialized their economies owe it to developing countries, and especially those in Africa, to take the first and big step toward stopping their greenhouse gas emissions. They need to help developing countries to “leapfrog” [jump over] those stages of development that would otherwise have to depend heavily on the use of coal, oil and wood, as they try to develop their economies. Rich countries borrowed the clean air (water, forests, and other natural resources) to develop their economies and societies. If they had borrowed money from a bank they would have had to pay back what they borrowed. Why not use the same thinking to get them to pay back Nature by cleaning up the mess they caused?