There is a battle of interest between
industrialised countries and Africa on how to alleviate the effects of
climate change leading to different conferences being held. The much
publicised were the Conference of Parties – known as COP15 – held in
2009; the United Nations, UN, climate talks in Warsaw, Poland, tagged
the COP19 – the 19thConference of Parties 2013; the pre-COP planned for Venezuela in 2014. The most recent is the 21st Conference of Parties, also – known as COP21 – held in Paris in 2015.
Lakes are still drying in Africa,
unpredictable rainfalls are being experienced, there is continuous rise
of temperature, brunting weather molds, water supply and quality
shortages, agriculture and food decline, human health worsening, shelter
and ecosystems lacerating, erosion taking over landscapes, crop and
food shortages and many others characterising the environment, upon
governments and groups are gathering to talk about measures to arrest
the effects of climate change.
Godwin Ojo on his return to Nigeria from the 21st
Conference of Parties (also known as COP21) held in Paris in 2015,
which attracted roughly 50,000 participants including 25,000 official
delegates from governments, intergovernmental organisations, UN
agencies, NGOs, and civil society, lamented about the fight of interest.
He is the Executive Director of Environmental Rights Action and was one
of the representatives of 195 countries that were gathered in Paris to
adopt a novel pact on how to conduct mitigation and adaptation measures
concerning climate change.
His expression-of-grief after
returning from the COP21 stemmed from the fact that there was a battle
of interest between the industrialised rich countries and poor countries
at the COP21 over economic interest they gain through industrial
productions even when such activities undermine the environment. He
nearly regarded the COP21 as a talking jamboree, saying that there was
dearth of penalty stated in the case where any country fails the
reduction of their emission targets; this suggests that the developed
countries are meting out unfair treatments to developing countries, with
their frail ambition in cutting climate change, and making Africa to
lose billions of money to the rest of the world.
“COP21 was almost a talking jamboree,
except that a historic treaty was signed. The outcome was long
predicted. It was a continued fight between industrialised rich
countries of the world and the poor countries of the world. Despite the
energy and time put into the talks, the governments represented the
voice of corporations far more than the citizens they govern,” Ojo said.
Africa is said to be at the centre
stage of feeling the ruins of climate change while the rich countries
are gearing towards a new global measures on emissions, due to their
economic interest. Where the developed countries made the notion known
is called the Kyoto Protocol – where they wanted to strike a deal on the
new laws for emission. But countries that include Saudi Arabia,
Bolivia, China, Venezuela called “the like-minded developing nations”
kicked hard against the deal that the developed world was striking on
emission.
After the Kyoto Protocol, Nnimmo
Bassey, well-known environmental activist from Nigeria and founder of
Home of Mother Earth Foundation, HOMEF, said that in the COP, as at
others, Japan, Canada, the USA and Australia continued an alarming
climate-operational quartet, locking the planet on the unpreventable
path of fugitive global warming.
Bassey said, “We recall that Japan was
the first country to signify that they would not go ahead with another
period of the Kyoto Protocol, the only piece of global legally binding,
albeit weak, agreement aimed at curtailing emissions to save the planet.
“A further downside of the COP was
pointed by the chief negotiator for China who noted that a developed
country delegate gave ‘multiple signs that it was utterly unwilling to
take the UN climate process seriously, the integrity of the talks was
further jeopardised.”
Empty talk on climate change
Without doubt, there are the ghastly
effects of climate change affecting the rise of the global population
without access to electricity, whereas the developed countries body
language suggests that they love their industries that contribute to the
menace on the environment instead of cut down their emission. But when
conferences are held to cushion the effects of climate change, heavy
polluters and corporations are fingered to dominate the conference, as
according to Jagoda Munic, Chairperson of Friends of the Earth
International, “with their empty talk”.
Munic was among the persons that
walked out at the Conference of Parties – COP15 in 2009 – in Copenhagen.
He lamented, “While people around the world are paying with their lives
and livelihoods, and the risk of runaway climate change draws closer,
we simply could not sit by this egregious inaction. Corporate profits
should not come before peoples’ lives.”
What Ojo was crying about today – of
the industrialised countries not interested in curbing climate change –
led to activists walking out of the UN climate talks in Warsaw, Poland,
tagged the COP19 – the 19thConference of Parties to the UN
Framework Convention on Climate Change – which ended on November 23,
2013, with delegates not reaching a far compromise on how to fight
global warming. Bassey said that the walk out sent a strong signal that
“the days of empty talks must come to an end.”
“They sent a strong signal that the
pre-COP planned for Venezuela in 2014 and COP21 planned for Paris in
2015 must be different significantly from the climate games being
currently played in these events,” Bassey, said. Many rather saw the
conference as a waste of energy.
Martin Kaiser of Greenpeace Germany,
said, “The climate conference in Warsaw was a waste of energy. It was
already clear by midweek that small steps forward would be sold as
successes but would not help us to negotiate a global climate protection
agreement by 2015.”
Simon Anderson, Head of climate change
group at the International Institute for Environment and Development,
IIED, said, “There is no sense from the outcomes of Warsaw that climate
justice is any closer than before the COP was inaugurated. The delays in
countries disclosing how they will address reducing greenhouse gas
emissions continue. It would seem that we are moving almost inevitably
to a 4C degree warmer world.”
While there was an agreement that
recognised limiting temperature rise to under I.5 degrees at the COP21,
as was harangued by scientists and pushed by global civil society
groups, it has been assisted within a two degrees development alleyway.
This was even as Ojo gave his nod that heavy polluters of the COP should
be shown the exit door in order to demonstrate a point and bar shoddy
energy companies that are in the business of colossal emissions not to
be among the team of decision making process. Ojo frowned that the COP21
ended in talks without concrete measures put in place to the “legally
binding and universal agreement on climate”, which was what the
conference was meant.
The same was the fate of the
Conference of Parties – COP15 in 2009 – in Copenhagen; it dashed the
hopes of many. Dr. Anderson said, “The need for both finance and
disbursal mechanisms that genuinely reflect and respond to the needs of
countries and people that need to adapt and become more climate
resilient become even more important. In the absence of agreement on a
mid-term target and a clear pathway, poor and vulnerable countries are
unable to understand how the developed countries are going to deliver
the promised target of US$100 billion annually by 2020. Looking at
decisions related to long term finance, developing countries can see a
few gains, but there were reassuring words and little else.”
Effects of failed talks on Africa
Talks have been made in different
quarters among stakeholders that countries in the West like the United
States, China, and the European Union account for almost 50 per cent of
greenhouse gas emissions around the globe, whereas Africa suffers the
brunt most. While speaking in Abu Dhabi, the United Arab Emirates in
February 2016 during the 2016 World Future Energy Summit, President
Muhammadu Buhari lamented of how Africa was already doomed from the
outcomes of climate change.
The billions of money that Africa
loses to the rest of the world was captured by the Jubilee Debt
Campaign, 15 July 2014, saying, “New research published today by 10 UK
and African NGOs reveals Africa is losing $192 billion every year to the
rest of the world – almost six and a half times the amount of ‘aid’
given back to the continent. This research is the first attempt to
calculate Africa’s losses across a wide range of areas. These include:
illicit financial flows; profits taken out of the continent by
multinational companies; debt payments; brain drain of skilled workers;
illegal logging and fishing and the costs incurred as a result of
climate change.”
Ojo made a proposal for unrestrained
de-carbonisation of the Nigeria’s economy and the energy sector. He
wanted Nigeria to acknowledge and encourage an energy changeover from
oil, gas, coal and other fossil fuels by 2030, by the governments
divesting public finance, subsidies and loans for oil, gas and coal.
He believed that renewable energy
development was the key to helping the environment if the governments
could channel the money into this sector. Buhari’s evidence was that
there are droughts and floods in Africa as a result of climate change.
The bewildered President of Nigeria
showed expression in the areas of the extreme drying up of the Lake Chad
to just about 10 per cent of its original size. He said that this is
having depressingly crash on the livelihood of millions of people.
“With all due respect to our
neighbours, Nigeria has been worst hit by the drying up of the Lake Chad
and we are hoping that the global community will support the process of
halting the drying up of the lake,” Buhari said. The president outlined
that land erosion is threatening farming, forestry, town and village
peripheries in the middle and southern part of Nigeria and in some
areas, major highways.
“Desert encroachment in Niger, our
northern neighbour and in far northern Nigeria, at the rate of several
hundred meters per annum, has impacted on the existence of man, animal
and vegetation, threatening to alter the whole ecological balance of the
sub-region,” Buhari added.
As climate change goes on in Africa
About $16.9 billion, according to the
Federal Government of Nigeria Report of a Post Disaster Needs Assessment
conducted between November 2012 and March 2013, was lost to
infrastructure, physical and strong assets and diagonally economic
sectors due to the effects of a 2012 flood adversity in Nigeria.
There is apprehension that that over
180 million people in sub-Sahara Africa alone risk death by the end of
the century as the climate change goes on. What this means is that they
are pronto the effects of change in rainfall, lower crop yields, heat
wave and so many others that are yielding to human tension, mitigation
and conflict. The population of people without access to electricity is
rife in Africa with the unrepentant characteristics of energy
challenges.
The 2014 Africa Energy Outlook, the
International Energy Association, gave a rough estimation of 620 million
living in the absence of electricity and many in the number of 730
million using risky methods as means of cooking. This does not leave
about 600,000 people from dying as a result of indoor pollution from
over-dependence on biomass for cooking. In looking for ways to curb the
menace of climate change and make provision for energy, there have been
different alliances the United Nations, including Africa, had formed to
develop sustainable energy.
There have been the Sustainable Energy
for All (SE4ALL) Initiative; Sustainable Development Goals
(particularly Goal Seven on energy); UN Climate Change Conference Paris
2015; African Energy Leaders Group (AELG) at the World Economic Forum
(WEF) Davos 2015; Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Others are Friends of the Earth
International; the International Trade Union Confederation; Pan-African
Climate Justice Alliance, Bolivian Platform on Climate Change, Jubilee
South (APMDD), 350.org;
Greenpeace; WWF; Oxfam; ActionAid; and the Philippines Movement on
Climate; Africa’s Renewable Energy Initiative at COP 21, the AfDB’s
Sustainable Energy Fund for Africa (SEFA); global Greenhouse Gas (GHG)
emissions; United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
(UNFCCC). Yet, Africa is still grappling with energy difficulties and
the effects of climate change.
The long years establishment and
investment in fossil fuel energy which is led by the public sector, have
not produced the desired result. For instance, there is a stance that
about $16 billion was spent by Nigeria between 1999 and 2007 on energy
alone. Many of such huge sums of money were expended on the National
Integrated Power Project (NIPP) without it yielding the expected power
supply.
Diplomatic rows
Since the developed world have been
said to be more interested in what becomes of their industries which
contribute to climate change, Africa may be losing in the diplomatic
rows for a strong international leadership and futuristic policies. This
makes Africa more susceptible to the impacts of climate change.
Apart from the West that has been said
that contributes 50 per cent of the emissions in the world,
South-Africa with her addiction to coal and problems of debt might not
be having it fair with the change. There is a herald that Eskom with the
construction for Kusile, regarded as “the monstrous coal-fired power
plant”, with the cost of the R60.6 billion, would have been beneficial
that the country invested in renewable energy as alternative to energy.
Africa is not learning from the past
mistakes in these times of climate change as many countries on the
continent are gearing towards establishing nuclear energy, investing in
renewable energy and not, leaving gas flaring, coal mining as means of
energy utilisation, when it is clear that experts have said that the
global carbon bank that should hold developed countries answerable has
not been used to generate solutions.
On May 18, 2016, the Federal
Government of Nigeria through the Minster of Power, Works and Housing,
Mr. Babatunde Fashola said at forum in Abuja, that Nigeria had secured
the necessary certification from the International Atomic Energy Agency
(IAEA). How to safeguard against catastrophic climate change is the
bane, no matter the numerous jobs that such feat portends to create. In
many of the African countries, energy security is not guaranteed.
For instance in Nigeria where the ears
were deafened for liberalisation of the Nigerian power sector at the
peak of the millennium, the people are still praying for power. But this
is not the case with a place like England where the 1989/1990 reforms,
bring to the world’s glare as the epicentre of contemporary day
electricity market liberalisation, when most African countries are
lagging in the development of key power generation sub-sectors.
It is observable that with all the gas
flaring and coal mining in the sub-Sahara Africa, energy poverty
remains rife. The developed world with its hyper-industrialised
activities is not helping the continent of Africa for energy
sufficiency, except “the lack of access to modern energy services”.
Conversely, while the industrialised
countries and Africa are logged in the clash of interest, experts have
pointed out that individuals can contribute to the fight against climate
change. Elizabeth Landau of the Cable News Network, CNN, on May 6,
2014, talked about five steps individuals can take at home to take
action which include: to become informed, make changes at home, be
greener at the office, reduce emissions in transit and get involved and
educate others about the big picture.
Onwumere, is a Rivers State-based poet, writer and consultant and winner, in the digital category, Nordica Media Merit Awards 2016.
By Odimegwu Onwumere/Thisday
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