RT
Climate change is an existential threat to Africa, and Africa is bearing the brunt of it despite its negligible contribution to carbon emissions. Africa’s weak states are often poorly governed, so climate change is bound to accelerate Africa’s governance challenges and political instability. Owing to unpredictable weather patterns, climate change has contributed to resource scarcity, food insecurity (due to low yields or failed harvests), prolonged droughts, regular floods, wildfires, locust invasions, and a rise in the disease burden.
Conflicts over scarce resources and mass unrest in urban areas due to failing economies are likely to increase in Africa. Poverty and inequality are already rife because of the debt burden, unfavorable terms of trade, endemic corruption, and the exploitation of Africa’s resources by external actors in concert with predatory local political elites. This is a powder keg.
Governance is integral to the mitigation of climate change. Africa’s vulnerability stems from its weak institutions, and external meddling in its affairs, which takes the form of predation by imperialist forces. A vicious colonial legacy characterized by environmental degradation, crushing poverty, inequalities, and protracted violence undermines the state in Africa. In the extant global order, the West exercises outsized power, resulting in poverty and chaos in far-flung regions – the periphery, according to world-systems theory. Thus, the climate change problem falls within the center-periphery problem.
Climate change, therefore, is about more than just ecology. Africa’s political elite are not innocent bystanders, either. They hoard power and the attendant economic benefits at the expense of the masses and facilitate imperial exploits. This widespread ecosystem of inequality, social injustice, exploitation, and violence is the crux of the problem.
Adaptation efforts, unless sensitive to inequality and the power imbalance that pivots international relations, are not sustainable. Climate change negotiations are mired in a historical ecology of predation, colonialism and imperialism that has had Africa in a chokehold for millennia. Thus, the inequitable global power divide runs insidiously throughout the climate change discourse. The greatest carbon emitters, the Western countries, have a moral responsibility to reverse the effects of climate change but tend to insist on sharing the burden. China and India, which are also carbon emitters because of rapid economic advancement, also bear responsibility.
Due cognizance must be accorded to the indigenous knowledge systems in Africa for the sustainability of climate change adaptation measures. Amid the green energy transition initiatives, Africa must assert itself regarding indigenous seeds and time-tested traditional forms of knowledge to ensure equity, justice, and sovereignty.
The implementation of well-thought-out action plans across Africa, political will, financial and technical support from the West, and cooperation with fast-developing China and India are prerequisites for climate change mitigation strategies. Africa, however, must be cautious, because underneath this support could lie strings. China’s energy demand, owing to its ambitious development agenda, now rivals the West. This renders China indispensable to climate change negotiations. Africa should devise strategies that do not replicate conventional Western consumption models. Furthermore, the top-down approach that undergirds the lopsided West-Africa relationship is no longer tenable.
