Despite the breakdown of UN climate-change talks in Bali last December, the same themes were still being pushed at this week’s meeting in Ghana — but now developing countries have begun to question the effects on the world’s poorest.
Although he recognizes that vulnerability to climate is a result of poverty, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, had stated he wanted to focus on emissions reductions, to slow down or even halt climate change. This is the standard UN line, strongly supported by the EU and Japan, among others. Not everyone was so keen.
“It is clear that mitigation cannot be a priority for developing countries any more. Adaptation is clearly the way forward,” Ghanaian representative William Agyeman-Bonsu said.
Indeed, nearly all the Least Developed Countries were far more interested in coping with current and future conditions rather than sacrificing economic growth at the altar of emissions reductions, especially when India’s and China’s growth make the idea redundant.
Many of the predicted impacts of climate change, from increased flooding to the spread of infectious diseases, have long been around, killing kill millions of people every year — particularly the poorest.
For poor countries it is therefore essential that climate change policy does not undermine the biggest anti-poverty weapon of all, economic growth. How governments respond, trying to adapt to climate change or trying to stop it, will make all the difference. The UN has claimed that foreign aid can help, but Africa’s countless aid-financed infrastructure projects, riddled with corruption and waste, demonstrate otherwise.
Many have attributed this week’s images of torn bridges and flooded farmlands in Sandema in northern Ghana to climate change. In reality, flooding is a seasonal event that has been occurring for centuries. Farmers suffer in this region because a lack of other jobs forces them to remain in the low-lying basins of the White Volta. So their real problem is poverty, not climate.
Their plight is exacerbated by the cyclical Bagre Dam spillages from neighboring Burkina Faso. From the beginning, the two countries did not work together, relying instead on a badly managed foreign aid package.
It is easy to see why poor countries are skeptical about spending billions of dollars on emissions reduction when similar amounts could improve the infrastructure that keeps the weather at bay — dams, flood defenses, drainage and so on. For many, discussing the future seems irrelevant when the present is so bleak.
De Boer also spoke of the need to stop deforestation as part of climate mitigation strategies. The issues are similar. Ghana has lost half its forests over the past 50 years to slash-and-burn agriculture and logging, with Sandema being one of the worst affected areas.
Local people are best placed to prevent the disappearance of forests — but to do so, they need to know that conservation will work with, not against, their economic well-being. Tourism and the wider leisure industry have proved successful in checking deforestation in the Caribbean, while plantation forestry and lumber management have achieved similar outcomes in Japan, Indonesia and Argentina.
The common factor has been the promotion of clearly defined, and often transferable, property rights. Rights over natural resources empower individuals and communities, meaning those best equipped to conserve their surroundings have an incentive to do so.
Such property rights, together with the rule of law, also have the wider effect of bringing economic growth, which reduces climate vulnerability — especially vulnerability to the diseases that kill millions right now. Governments and international organizations need to focus on true sustainable development, the kind that helps both the environment and the people who live in it.
Climate mitigation schemes, in contrast, are too often dreamed up by bureaucrats with little appreciation of the local situation. The Nigerian government, for example, recently announced its intention to generate 20 percent of energy from renewable sources by 2012, forgetting that the vast majority of its people rely on noxious fuels like wood or dung because they have no access to existing electricity, let alone any future schemes. Nigeria has recently spent more than US$10 billion, according to some estimates, on an energy program that has added zero megawatts to existing supply.
People need electricity now, not pipe dreams: sustainable bio-mass fuels, meaning dung and wood, kill at least 1.6 million children a year, the WHO says.
The world’s poorest countries must continue to fight for greater realism in the climate debate: Their livings and even their lives depend on it.
Franklin Cudjoe and Bright Simons are executive director and director of development respectively at the IMANI Center for Education & Policy in Ghana.
What began on Feb. 28 as a military campaign against Iran quickly became the largest energy-supply disruption in modern times. Unlike the oil crises of the 1970s, which stemmed from producer-led embargoes, US President Donald Trump is the first leader in modern history to trigger a cascading global energy crisis through direct military action. In the process, Trump has also laid bare Taiwan’s strategic and economic fragilities, offering Beijing a real-time tutorial in how to exploit them. Repairing the damage to Persian Gulf oil and gas infrastructure could take years, suggesting that elevated energy prices are likely to persist. But the most
In late January, Taiwan’s first indigenous submarine, the Hai Kun (海鯤, or Narwhal), completed its first submerged dive, reaching a depth of roughly 50m during trials in the waters off Kaohsiung. By March, it had managed a fifth dive, still well short of the deep-water and endurance tests required before the navy could accept the vessel. The original delivery deadline of November last year passed months ago. CSBC Corp, Taiwan, the lead contractor, now targets June and the Ministry of National Defense is levying daily penalties for every day the submarine remains unfinished. The Hai Kun was supposed to be
The Legislative Yuan on Friday held another cross-party caucus negotiation on a special act for bolstering national defense that the Executive Yuan had proposed last year. The party caucuses failed to reach a consensus on several key provisions, so the next session is scheduled for today, where many believe substantial progress would finally be made. The plan for an eight-year NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.59 billion) special defense budget was first proposed by the Cabinet in November last year, but the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) lawmakers have continuously blocked it from being listed on the agenda for
On Tuesday last week, the Presidential Office announced, less than 24 hours before he was scheduled to depart, that President William Lai’s (賴清德) planned official trip to Eswatini, Taiwan’s sole diplomatic ally in Africa, had been delayed. It said that the three island nations of Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar had, without prior notice, revoked the charter plane’s overflight permits following “intense pressure” from China. Lai, in his capacity as the Republic of China’s (ROC) president, was to attend the 40th anniversary of King Mswati III’s accession. King Mswati visited Taiwan to attend Lai’s inauguration in 2024. This is the first
RSS