Climate change:A battle between industrialized rich countries, Africa
(Nigeria) By Odimegwu Onwumere
There is a battle of interest between industrialized
countries and Africa on how to alleviate the effects of climate change leading
to different conferences being held. The much publicized were the Conference of
Parties – known as COP15 – held in 2009; the United Nations, UN, climate talks
in Warsaw, Poland, tagged the COP19 – the 19th Conference 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 characterizing
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 organizations, 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 to the fact that there was a battle of interest between the
industrialized 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 industrialized 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 jeopardized.”
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 industrialized
countries not interested in curbing climate change – led to activists walking
out of the UN climate talks in Warsaw, Poland, tagged the COP19 – the 19th
Conference 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 recognized 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 2 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 percent 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, Major General 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 6 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-carbonization 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% 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, as 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%
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 utilization, 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
liberalization 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, brings to the world’s glare as the
epicentre of contemporary day electricity market liberalization, 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-industrialized activities is not helping the continent of
Africa for energy sufficiency, except “the lack of access to modern energy
services”.
Conversely, while the industrialized 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 1. To become informed. 2. Make
changes at home. 3. Be greener at the office. 4. Reduce emissions in transit.
5. Get involved and educate others about the big picture.
*Odimegwu Onwumere is a Rivers State based poet, writer and consultant
and winner.
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