16. Our Shared Environment
Anthropogenic global warming poses a particularly profound threat to Africa. Although hardest hit by climate change, the terrible irony is that Africa among all continents is least responsible for the problem.
As Nigerian ecologist Nnimmo Bassey has put it: “There is a climate debt that must be recognized and paid. The payment is not all about finance but principally about decolonizing the atmospheric space and redistributing the meagre space left. Developed countries already occupy 80% of the space.”1
During the twentieth century average temperatures rose 0.7 Celsius across the continent.2 With the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere having risen from 280 parts per million prior to the Industrial Revolution to 400 ppm today, climate models predict growing deviation from “normal” temperatures across the continent. If nothing is done to curtail greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) average temperatures may rise 7°C in southern Africa and 8°C in the north by century’s end.3 Reaching nearly twice the global average, this would greatly destabilize human life on the continent. In 2012 the Climate Vulnerability Monitor concluded that climate disturbances were responsible for 400,000 deaths per year, mostly in Africa.4 Bassey has dubbed growing carbon emissions a “death sentence for Africa” while Naomi Klein reports that “African delegates at UN climate summits have begun using words like ‘genocide’ to describe the collective failure to lower emissions.”5
Africa is the region of the world most vulnerable to climate change. A 2011 African Development Bank assessment concluded that “the majority of both bottom up and top down (‘integrated assessment’) studies suggest that damages from climate change, relative to population and GDP, will be higher in Africa than in any other region in the world.” The report continued, arguing that “climate damages in Africa, as a percentage of GDP, may be 10% higher than the next most exposed region (India) and more than twice as high as in the US, Russia, Eurasia and Latin America. Breaking these impacts into specific sectors or components further illustrates these vulnerabilities, with recent studies into health, agriculture and water all demonstrating that Africa is often more vulnerable to climate change along these dimensions than any other region.”6
Various ecological, economic and social factors explain the continent’s vulnerability. Most Africans are directly dependent on resource sectors — fisheries, forestry and agriculture — that are particularly vulnerable to climate conditions. Between half and two thirds of the continent’s people are subsistence farmers who largely rely on natural rainfall, rather than irrigation, to water their crops. Additionally, large swaths of the continent are arid and a third of Africa’s productive area is already classified as dry land.7 As such, subsistence farmers’ crop yields and incomes are easily damaged by reduced or intermittent rainfall.
A rise in temperatures of 1.5°-2°C would severely compromise food security. This increase is expected to result in a 40-80 percent drop in available cropland for maize, millet and sorghum, important staples in many areas.8 According to Tanzanian Minister of State for the Environment Binilith Mahenge, “global warming of 2˚C would put over 50 per cent of the African continent’s population at risk of undernourishment.”9
CO2 induced food shortages are not in some far off dystopian future. British climate scientists suggest global warming sparked a major famine in Somalia in 2011. Somalia’s short rains failed in late 2010 from the natural effects of the La Nina weather pattern, according to Britain’s Met Office weather service. But, as explained by Peter Stott, head of the Climate Monitoring and Attribution team at the Met Office, the dearth of long rains in early 2011 resulted from “systematic warming due to influence on greenhouse gas concentrations.”10 Over 50,000 Somalis died as a result of the famine.11
While water shortages represent a threat to many, an excess of this life-sustaining liquid poses a hazard elsewhere. The African island states of the Seychelles, Cape Verde and Mauritius may disappear as a result of rising sea levels caused by climate change. Similarly, a quarter of Africa’s population lives within 100 km of the continent’s 38,000-km coastline.12 Without significant investments to mitigate risks to major metropolises, such as Dar es Salaam, Mombasa and Lagos, the threat of flooding looms.
Climate change may also deepen the scourge of Africa’s biggest killer, malaria. An increase in temperature allows the spread of both the vector of the disease and the causal agent to higher altitudes. An increase in temperatures also affects areas where malaria is already established by reducing the interval between the mosquito’s blood meals and shortening the incubation period of the parasite in the mosquito. Reversing recent successes in combating the disease, climate change may expose tens of millions more Africans to malaria. Time Magazine environmental reporter Bryan Walsh notes: “Malaria, like many infectious diseases, is first and foremost a problem of development and poverty — and when those are addressed, infections fall. But by expanding the range of malaria, climate change will make a tough challenge all the more difficult. It’s just one more way carbon can kill.”13
Carbon can also trigger the taking up of arms. A University of California Berkeley study found a statistical link between the hotter temperatures generated by climate change and the risk of armed conflict in sub-Saharan Africa. The researchers forecast a 54 per cent rise in civil conflict on the continent due to climate change by 2030, causing 393,000 more combat deaths.14
Climate change spurred violent cattle raids in north-western Kenya and triggered the 2012 Tuareg rebellion in Mali. The mid-2000s violence in Sudan’s Darfur region was dubbed the world’s “first climate change war.” A persistent reduction in rainfall in the area exacerbated ethnic tensions that left hundreds of thousands dead. “The Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change,” wrote UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, in a 2007 Washington Post op-ed. “It is no accident that the violence in Darfur erupted during the drought.”15
Increasing the strain on governance structures, climate change has already exacerbated inequities and ethnic divisions in parts of the continent. Climate change may well propel large areas of Africa into a downward cycle, further undermining the capacity of communities and governments to cope.
It is alarming that certain solutions proposed from the west as a means to combat anthropogenic global warming also threaten many Africans. A proposal to dampen temperature increases by injecting sulphur into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight away from the earth could cause a staggering drop in plant productivity in the Sahel.16 Several computer-modeling studies indicate that a sulphate based solar radiation management (SRM) intervention from a northern hemisphere point of origin would decrease plant productivity by 60-100% in six Sahel countries. Part of the Integrated Assessment of Geo-engineering Proposals project, Leeds University professor Piers Forster told BBC News that “the most striking example of a downside would be the complete drying-out of the Sahel region of Africa — that would be very difficult to adapt to for those substantial populations — and that happens across all the scenarios.”17
An SRM intervention from a southern hemisphere point of origin would probably lead to a better outcome for Africans. But it would likely increase hurricane frequency in the US and Canada. In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein writes: “Does anyone actually believe that geo-engineering will be used to help Africa if that help could come only by putting North America at greater risk of extreme weather?”18
While engineering a mammoth sulphuric volcano to counteract anthropogenic global warming may sound like the basis of a sci-fi thriller, SRM initiatives have found backing from the likes of Bill Gates, Richard Branson and the American Enterprise Institute.19 And while one would like to believe that no government would proceed with a climate engineering initiative likely to harm large swaths of Africa, isn’t that precisely what Canada and the other big carbon emitters are already doing?
Most African governments can contribute little to curtail runaway global warming because their countries’ carbon footprints are negligible compared to the biggest capitalist economies. Per capita emissions in most African countries amount to barely one percent of Canada’s rate. In Uganda, Congo, Benin, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Central African Republic, Chad, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Guinea, Lesotho, Malawi, Mali, Niger, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Rwanda and Mozambique, per capita emissions comprise less than 1/150th of Canada’s average.20 In Tanzania, Madagascar, Comoros, The Gambia, Liberia and Zambia per capita emissions are less than 1/80th Canada’s average.21
Even more startling is the historical imbalance among nations in global greenhouse gas emissions. According to a September 2009 Guardian comparison, Canada released 23,669 million metric tons of carbon dioxide between 1900 and 2004.22 Canada’s contribution to global warming over this period was more than the combined total of every sub-Saharan African country.23 While the historical data is troubling, forward-looking comparisons are equally bleak. If tar sands expansion proceeds as planned, by 2030 Alberta’s project will emit as much carbon as most of sub-Saharan Africa combined.24
Canadian officialdom has done little to regulate tar sands emissions and has, in fact, subsidized its extraction. Fearing policies that might impact sales of Alberta bitumen, Canadian officials have campaigned aggressively against any international effort to reduce carbon emissions from fuel sources. Canadian diplomats worked with feverish determination to undermine the European Union’s Fuel Quality Directive, a modest bid that would force suppliers to privilege lower-emission fuels. Illustrating the extent of the lobbying efforts, Friends of the Earth Europe determined that Canadian officials met British and European representatives 110 times between September 2009 and July 2011 in attempts to derail the Fuel Quality Directive and ensure what the Canadian government refers to as “non-discriminatory market access” for tar sands exports.25
Through its US Oil Sands Advocacy Strategy, the Canadian government also lobbied against any US legislation that might curtail tar sands expansion. Canadian officials targeted California’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard as well as Section 526 of the US Energy Security and Independence Act, which effectively forbids government agencies, including the oil-guzzling US military, from buying oil with a high carbon footprint. (See The Ugly Canadian: Stephen Harper’s Foreign Policy for more detail.)
The Canadian government’s priority in the US was to counter the massive social and environmental campaign that, as of August 2015, had blocked Calgary-based TransCanada’s plan to build the $7 billion Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to US refineries on the Gulf of Mexico. In January 2013, foreign minister John Baird announced that the top issue on his US agenda was the approval of the Keystone XL. The Canadian government (as well as those of Alberta and Saskatchewan) spent tens of millions of dollars pushing Keystone XL in a campaign that did everything from hiring lobbying firms and purchasing advertising to wining and dining members of the press.26
Despite the pleas of the scientific community, Canadian officials have gone to town promoting the tar sands. In 2011, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen, wrote that proceeding with planned tar sands expansion would be “game over for the climate” while a Nature analysis of international fossil-fuel deposits concluded that 85% of viable reserves and 99% of all Canadian bitumen had to be kept in the ground if humanity is to limit global warming to 2°C (the uppermost threshold at which uncontrollable positive feedback cycles — warming leading to more warming — will be triggered).
Indifferent to science, Canadian officials have also ignored pleas from the African continent. At the end of 2011, several prominent South Africans, including anti-apartheid hero Archbishop Desmond Tutu, criticized Alberta’s dirty oil in a full-page Globe and Mail advertisement. “For us in Africa, climate change is a life and death issue. By dramatically increasing Canada’s global warming pollution, tar sands mining and drilling makes the problem worse, and exposes millions of Africans to more devastating drought and famine today and in the years to come.”27
Despite the rising toll of climate change in Africa, the Canadian government pushed to grow the global “carbon bomb” in international forums. At every turn, Stephen Harper’s Conservatives blocked progress on setting minimally serious targets for reducing CO2 emissions. On at least six occasions between 2006 and 2014 Canada received the Colossal Fossil given out by hundreds of environmental groups to the country that did the most to undermine international climate negotiations meetings.28
Under Conservative government leadership, Canada became the first country to withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement committing leading industrial economies to reducing GHG emissions below 1990 levels by 2012. (Instead of attaining its 6% reduction target, Canada’s emissions increased 18 per cent.) A number of African officials criticized Canada for withdrawing from the Kyoto protocol.29 The Rwandan environment minister Stanislas Kamanzi told the New Times “it’s a pity that one of the highest emitters has decided to withdraw from the Protocol. Canada’s withdrawal will not only affect Africa but the world at large.”30
In 2013, Ottawa applauded a move by Australia’s new government to eliminate its carbon tax. A Guardian headline read: “Canada reveals climate stance with praise for Australian carbon tax repeal: Canada discourages other industrialized nations from following through on their own climate change commitments.”31
In addition to undermining international climate negotiations and the efforts of other nations to reduce GHGs, the Harper government made a mockery of its own commitments. As part of the 2009 Copenhagen Accord, Ottawa pledged to reduce carbon emissions 17 per cent by 2020 (from the levels in 2005). Five years later, however, Environment Canada admitted this target would not be reached. In fact, Environment Canada suggested emissions would rise 20% by 2020 and even higher afterwards.
In a sign of Ottawa’s near total indifference to the impact of global warming in Africa, Canada pulled out of an international accord to study the consequences of desertification, a process ravaging parts of the African continent. (The Sahara desert is expanding southward by 48 kilometers a year and nearly half of Africa’s landmass is affected by desertification processes.)32 In 2013, Canada withdrew from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in Countries Seriously Affected by Drought and/or Desertification, Particularly in Africa.
Adopted in 1994, this international convention collects and shares scientific information about drought and ways to curb its spread. By becoming the sole nation outside the convention, Canada saved itself a paltry $150,000 a year.33 While the savings barely registered in the federal government’s $260 billion budget, the message was clear.