Our podcast conversation this week with the Kenyan economist Anzetse Were was a feast of insights. Among these was her point that there is a massive lag between financing for climate mitigation versus climate adaptation. The former refers to measures directly aimed at reducing future greenhouse gas emissions that further worsen global warming. The latter relates to how we’ll adapt our societies to deal with the emissions already in our atmosphere. These historical emissions mean that a lot of global heating is already (ahem) baked in and with it the desertification, sea-level rise, and other challenges they cause.
I thought of Were’s point when I saw the announcement this week by Félix Tshisekedi, president of the Democratic Republic of Congo and current chair of the AU, of the African Adaptation Acceleration Program. The AU’s plan, with partners like the African Development Bank (AfDB), is aimed at this gap. It would target $25 billion at four fronts in the adaptation struggle: adaptive technologies for agriculture and food security, infrastructure resilience, adaptive job creation for young people, and innovative ways to catalyze more climate financing for Africa.
President Tshisekedi makes the obvious point that while Africa’s culpability is minuscule, the climate crisis will erase 15% of the continent’s GDP by 2030 and plunge 100 million of its people into poverty. This danger overlaps with the massive infrastructure and development gaps that Africans inherited from colonialism.
In other words, Africa is where mitigation and adaptation meet. In some cases, Africa presents the rare opportunity to do things right the first time, by building sustainable infrastructure where there was none before and piloting development plans that will minimize new emissions even as they correct the carbon-drunk delusions of the past.
In theory.
In reality, President Tshisekedi and co. still need to finance part of the plan. The AfDB pledged half of the $25 billion, and the AU will campaign at COP26 to get the rest. As he points out, for countries that spent $20 trillion to fight COVID, $12.5 billion is sofa change. [For context: Elon Musk this week made $36 billion in a single day.]
It’s exactly this point that makes me somewhat pessimistic. If COVID proved one thing it’s that there’s no limit to rich countries’ short-sightedness. The vaccine-grubbing, the coddling of pharma lobbies, and the pious double talk made clear that the calcified racism of the current international order will keep winning out, even as it’s generating new COVID mutations that will keep Global Northerners in booster queues for years to come.
That said, the fact that this plan is Africa-generated and Africa-focused is inspiring. It puts African realities first. One of these is an inherent orientation towards the future, growing from the fact that the continent has such a young population. The plan directly responds to the reality that the people who’ll have to clean up this mess are young and that any climate strategy has to find ways of reshaping economies to pay them to do that cleanup.
The iconic climate economist Nicolas Stern recently pointed out that current economic climate assessments ‘grossly undervalue the value the lives of young people and future generations.’ That’s doubly true when the youth in question are also people of color and especially when they’re poor.
The representatives from Beijing, Washington, and Brussels who will make decisions in Glasgow will surely bristle at my allegation that they’re so pickled in 20th century thinking that they’re incapable of even visualizing (not to mention caring about) the lives of African youth.
To which I say: Prove me wrong, baby.
Prove me wrong.
