Amira Sayed Ahmed Mohamed, a delegate from Egypt taking a selfie with dancers from Bomas of Kenya at KICC in Nairobi on September 5, 2023, during the Africa Climate Summit. PHOTO | EVANS HABIL | NMG
Africa’s first regional climate summit opened on Monday, in Nairobi, mired in dispute over its agenda.
At the core of the conflict, which has prompted 500 organisations to reject the summit’s curated plan as a Western takeover of African debate, sits a battle over focus that threatens to bring increasing fragmentation to the global climate debate.
The purpose of the Africa summit, defined by the United Nations, is to discuss climate mitigation to cut global greenhouse emissions and slow the progress of climate change, as part of its Net Zero initiative.
But, for Africa, which generates less than four percent of the world’s emissions, climate change is already delivering a crisis, which needs urgent attention to ways of adapting to stop surging death rates.
The battle between these two agendas is akin to a tussle between those trying to stop the train, and those trying to deal with the deaths the train’s passage is already causing.
In such a contest, the ongoing ‘off agenda’ status of Africa’s deaths is causing increasing rancour. But the continent is also seeking attention for issues that are barely yet documented.
For while the impact of drought is being counted, as are the deaths from floods, the disruption of rains and harvests and rising temperatures remain largely unmapped for their death tolls.
Yet, these drivers are setting up thousands of consequences, and almost all of them are hurting Africans far more than the populations of other areas of the world.
A case in point is the increasingly frequent flooding emptying sewage into streets and homes worldwide.
In the UK, any customer can call the sewage flooding service of their local water company to get a complete cleanup and all risks removed.
In Kampala, by contrast, there is no pit latrine ‘manager’ who is going to be cleaning up the streets and parallel waterways after a flood of human excrement.
Instead, the first and biggest state spend is on healthcare in the consequent cholera outbreak — by which time people are already dead.
This wildly increased vulnerability, which turns the same sewage overflow from an unpleasant nuisance into a killer, is playing out, similarly, across countless other climate change consequences, and the scale of many is now enormous.
An example is the way in which rising temperatures accelerate pests. There is scant general awareness of how grave this challenge is.
Yet a single study of one pest in Kenya found that where it used to breed less than one generation a year, of 30 to 50 eggs, it is now breeding five generations a year, creating 102.4 million pests from each adult female every 12 months.
This explosion in often damaging crop pests is, again, made more severe by Africa’s predominantly tropical climate, leaving farmers facing a yield battle that is far more challenging than elsewhere, being fought by families who are often already at the margins of food security.
This has brought a surge in aid initiatives, led by the world’s largest philanthropic funds, directed at increasing African climate resilience by working to reduce poverty and accelerate the achievement of the SDGs.
But these initiatives are not identifying high-killers from climate impacts and seeking to resolve them. Instead, they are working to accelerate African development, holistically — in a way of thinking that sees even seasoned climate professionals claiming that any initiative that creates jobs is climate adaptation because those on salaries can better cope with the hits.
As a catch-all, this has delivered multiple studies, this year, declaring that most of the funding claimed as climate finance is, in fact, completely untethered from either the drivers or impacts of climate change.
In practical terms, that can see funds poured into improving soil quality to increase yields, even as a million extra pests consume the same crops.
Moreover, without any means of evaluating their efficacy in reducing climate impacts, such generalist projects are also leaving untouched the development of the best and most effective ways to resolve specific, climate-induced risks.
Thus, even as African voices become more strident in calling for funding and focus on climate impacts, we have moved into the great wait, be it 10 years or 30, while academics and thought leaders, governments and NGOs move to focus on what the impacts are.
This leaves Africa facing decades of mounting death tolls, as and until it can find a way of measuring and showing how much it is hurting and how: in order to get amelioration planted firmly onto its own, and the world’s agenda.
The writer is a development communication specialist
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