The recent COP27 held in Sharm El-Sheikh was framed as the ‘African COP’, dedicated to addressing the needs of African countries. It was the first COP to officially include water on its agenda and discussions included sustainable adaptations and the role of public-private partnerships (see blog post 4). Perhaps most significantly, there was a call to address inequities in climate justice.
The consequences of climate change are unjustly distributed across the world, leaving many African countries in vulnerable positions. Typically, less economically developed countries have contributed the least to climate change, compared to typically more economically developed countries. At the same time, because of unique social and physical challenges, African countries are met with the brunt of climate impacts.
With the rapid rate of population growth and urbanisation, it is increasingly difficult for water infrastructure to adapt to these climate impacts. Furthermore, a key physical factor is that countries in Africa have high hydrological variability. Climate change has caused an intensification of precipitation, which will lead to more frequent, heavy precipitation events. This will be amplified disproportionately in the tropics because the Clausius-Clapeyron relation means more evaporation is required to reach saturation vapour pressure and produce precipitation. This could lead to more frequent and longer droughts, and more variable soil moisture which would impair crop yields.
‘Climate financing’, as agreed in the Green Climate Fund at COP15, has been presented to address climate justice through high-income countries providing financial support to low-income countries. Even if we ignore the fact that high-income countries are yet to meet these commitments, this is about more than just a financial transaction. It is about the moral responsibility to support the most vulnerable, especially considering histories of resource exploitation for which certain countries must take greater responsibility. This can only be achieved if the low-income countries that the fund was created to support, play a role in the management of it.
Williams et al. (2022) ambitiously but perhaps, necessarily, call for a reorganisation of international institutions such as the World Bank and United Nations (UN) so that their focus is to develop green and sustainable economies. For example, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) could be upgraded so that it is given the same level of importance as other UN bodies, to a full UN World Environment Organisation (WEO). Kenya, as the current host of the UNEP, proposed that a WEO would be able to coordinate the actions of smaller organisations, to achieve greater success than the current structure.
Overall, climate change impacts every aspect of today’s society and in Africa, particularly relates to issues of food security, health, infrastructure, energy and finance. These effects are largely felt by countries who have comparatively done little to cause them, yet current international institutions fail to adequately address climate justice. Nonetheless, it is possible to take a more positive view and suggest that increasing pressures could act as a catalyst for social and technological innovation, that will aid the development of a climate action plan centred around justice.
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