By Meshark Sikuku, Farm Systems and Sustainability Coordinator, Ripple Effect
The Nairobi Declaration, adopted on 6 September 2023 at the end of Africa’s first climate conference, was strong on rhetoric. What was needed was fewer words, less focus on money, and more action to reverse global heating.
If delegates and observers at the summit, including Ripple Effect’s team advocating for agroecological solutions, were hoping for bold new resolutions in the Nairobi Declaration, they were going to be disappointed. The old-news was even signposted in the declaration itself.
For example, the renewed commitment by developed countries to provide $100 billion in annual climate finance was promised 14 years ago.
Making good on loss and damage reparations; phasing down coal and other fossil fuels; strengthening actions to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, deforestation and desertification; restoring degraded lands; advancing green industrialization… These proposals have been discussed before at previous COPs, and commitments – including financial pledges – have been made.
And those climate finance commitments have so far yielded… not much.
How the Nairobi Declaration fails to deliver
My assessment has to be that the real objective of the Africa Climate Summit was not to focus front-and-centre on the climate crisis, and what green growth might look like.
Clear mechanisms for climate mitigation and adaptation measures – which the world desperately needs – came second to the goal of financial resource mobilization for Africa.
According to the Declaration, Africa is now calling for:
- Reforming Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs).
- Restructuring debt regimes.
- A global carbon tax where big emitters will pay more. Sounds good? Except that history tells us that polluting producers will continue to generate greenhouse gases for as long as they can afford to pay the taxes!
- Strengthening North to South partnerships for sustainable utilization of Africa’s natural assets, where one would argue, carbon trade is domiciled. But what does strengthening carbon trade really mean?
It simply means commercializing nature: doing business at the EXPENSE of nature.
More than money, Africa needs action to reverse climate crisis
It is a no-brainer that Africa requires finances for adaptation, mitigation, and development.
But the UN Secretary-General referred to the numbers that the summit really needed to be focused on: the statistics that demonstrate that the climate crisis is driven by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.
By focusing on climate financing, we are responding to effects rather the root causes of the challenge we face. It is projected that this challenge will become catastrophic if the global temperature changes increase to over 2°C. And the current data clearly shows that we are headed there. According to the World Meteorological Organization the increase in carbon dioxide levels from 2020 to 2021 (the year of the 26th COP) was larger than the average annual growth rate over the previous decade.
The focus of Africa’s climate summit was less about tackling the causes of the escalating climate crisis which has such a terrible and disproportionate impact on our continent. Financial pledges, largely from the big emissions countries, tipped the scales towards business-as-usual.
What Africa needed, and deserved, was fewer words and more action. More energy, brevity and clarity would have focused on accelerating the ambition for emissions reduction, with climate finance taking a back seat.
As mother nature is destroyed, she sweeps away with her that heavy investment, through floods, droughts, hurricanes, landslides, wildfires, and weather-related outbreaks of pests and diseases. And in the midst of it, the future of the smallholder farmers of Africa, hardest hit by the hostility of the climate crisis, is barely tenable.
Want to hear good news stories from Africa, get involved in fantastic fundraising and be part of exciting events? Fill out your details below and we will keep you updated by email.