The Challenge for Africa (33 page)

The results of this lack of prioritization are evident in the serious ecological decline throughout the continent. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, between 2000 and 2005 Africa lost about ten million acres (or 1 percent) of its forests a year—a rate more than three times the global average.
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Loss of forest was significant in Angola, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Sudan, Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. According to a recent UNEP study, the current pace of deforestation is a concern in thirty-five African countries, while significant loss of biodiversity affects thirty-four. Overgrazing and other poor farming practices have led to the expansion of the Sahara Desert south into northern Nigeria and northern Kenya. Malawi has been almost wholly deforested.
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And the list goes on.

According to UNEP's
Global Environment Outlook 4
(2007), which compiled data from scientists and international agencies on the entire range of environmental and social indicators, by the middle of this century climate change could affect growing seasons in northern Africa, because less rain will water semi-arid systems. On the coasts of western and central African nations, rising sea levels and flooding could result in the disruption of coastal settlements, while the further destruction of mangrove swamps and coastal degradation could have negative impacts on fisheries and tourism, with some estimates pointing to a 2 to 4 percent loss of agricultural GDP in that region.

Southern and western Africa, as well as the Sahel region, may become more parched, including in the drylands that skirt expanding deserts. Similarly, the Kalahari through to the arid regions in northern South Africa, Angola, and Zambia may experience larger sandstorms and more dynamic dune fields (that is, shifting desert landmasses), because less moisture and higher winds will lead to a decline of the vegetation that binds sand to the ground.
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Scientists are predicting that some regions in Africa will receive more rain, particularly in the tropics and some parts of the east. This may allow the cultivation of new crop varieties. However, previously malaria-free highland areas in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Burundi could increasingly see the presence of malaria-carrying mosquitoes, especially by the 2080s. Southern Africa, too, may see the southward expansion of the transmission zone for malaria-bearing mosquitoes. Mountain biodiversity could be impacted, and there is the possibility that fish stocks in some major East African lakes could decline.
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Climate change threatens to eliminate or severely reduce the glaciers on Mounts Kenya and Kilimanjaro, as well as those in the Rwenzori Mountains of Uganda.

A world where climate shocks become more common will also ratchet up risk factors for conflict between and within countries. Researchers found that when shortfalls in seasonal rains led to drought and economic distress in forty sub-Saharan African countries between 1981 and 1999, the likelihood of civil war rose by 50 percent.
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Millions of Africans may become environmental refugees this century because of the effects of climate change. This is in spite of the fact that, at 4 percent of the world's total, and one ton of carbon dioxide a year per person on average, Africa's collective and individual greenhouse gas emissions are negligible—in contrast to those of the emerging economic giants of China and India, and Europe. And North America, home continent of the United States, one of the world's top emitters of greenhouse gases, consumes over 24 percent of total global primary energy despite having only one-twentieth of the world's population.
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The argument over whether climate change is or is not exacerbated by human activity has, to all intents and purposes, been settled. What remains for the world to decide is what actions it will take to reduce the intensity and scale of those changes. While it isn't yet possible to pin specific meteorological events on global warming, it is evident that for the poor of the developing world, the effects of climate change are already being felt and the threats to human well-being caused by environmental degradation are neither abstract nor localized.

These changes would be hard to adjust to in and of themselves even if they were not compounded by the problems already facing the African continent. Almost half of Africa's land area is vulnerable to desertification—particularly the Sahel and southern Africa.
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In addition, the Sahara continues to spread by thirty miles a year,
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and the pace of desertification
has doubled since the 1970s.
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Within three generations, by the 2080s, the proportion of arid and semi-arid lands in Africa is likely to increase by 5 to 8 percent.
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Climate change will also have social and economic effects. Millions more poor people from rural areas are likely to relocate to cities, or to seek to flee their countries altogether, joining other environmental refugees. Coastal areas may become less habitable, forcing people living there to find other means of earning an income or to migrate inland. Women will be disproportionately affected by climate change, because across Africa they are most directly dependent on natural resources. They collect the firewood and draw the water; they plant the seeds and harvest the crops. However, women's voices have been largely absent from policy discussions and negotiations over global warming. Their experiences, creativity, and leadership should be part of the solution to the climate crisis.

Scientists are only just beginning to understand the depth and range of services provided by Earth's ecosystems.
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In 1998, a team of economists and scientists estimated that the life systems of the planet provided an astonishing $33 trillion worth of benefits,
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or even as much as $54 trillion.
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Yet the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a global effort undertaken between 2001 and 2005 involving nearly 1,500 researchers worldwide, found that a majority of both land and marine ecosystems throughout the planet are degraded, some critically.
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If these trends are not reversed, many livelihoods will be threatened.

Of course, the cavalier attitude toward the Earth is not only an African problem: the danger we collectively face—of not paying sufficient attention until too much has been lost—challenges all human societies. Indeed, according to the 2005 Footprint of Nations report, humanity's collective ecological
footprint averages out at 21.9 hectares (about 54 acres) per person, although the planet's biological capacity can support only an average footprint of 15.7 hectares (about 39 acres) per person. (The footprint analysis measures the combined natural resources—such as water, energy, land, and forests—used to support a person's lifestyle.) Although the average ecological footprint in the developed world far surpasses the size of that in Africa (less than one hectare, or 2.5 acres, per person),
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the fact that humanity's current use of resources is outstripping the planet's ecological capacity should give all of us reason to pause. It is simply not sustainable for the rest of the world to mine, log, drill, build, dam, drain, and pave in a rush to achieve the standards of living of the industrialized countries, which themselves depend on massive resource extraction from the global South.

Given these realities, it continues to baffle me that African leaders do not educate their people so they understand the enormous threat likely to face them and how important it is for them to use the resources within their borders to mitigate this threat and adapt to the inevitable changes in climate. States are custodians of these resources, and citizens have an interest in how these resources are managed on their behalf. Throughout Africa, the budgets of environmental ministries are dwarfed by those of defense ministries or national security, even in countries where the major threat to security is desertification, poverty, and unemployment. It further astonishes me that those concerned with or working for the development agenda in Africa still don't acknowledge that the environment must be at the center of all solutions, just as neglect of it is at the root of our most pressing problems. The continent must wake up.

It is this prevailing mind-set that explains, in part, why Africa lags behind other developing regions in progress toward
the Millennium Development Goals. If Africa does not change, not only will it not achieve the MDGs, it will also further degrade or destroy the resource base on which development depends, and in so doing exacerbate and entrench the challenges that the continent faces. No amount of advanced weaponry can fight the desert. But the problem can be overcome by planting trees and other vegetation to curb soil loss and harvest rainwater, and it is in repulsing the sands of the desert as they encroach on arable land and in fighting deforestation and climate change that the genuine battle for national and human security lies.

Just as natural resources provide the basis for human development, they also serve as a buffer against the worst effects of climate change. There is a cruel irony in the fact that the negative effects of climate change will be felt most keenly by those least responsible for creating global warming. As major polluters, the industrialized countries have a responsibility to deal with climate change at home, but also to assist Africa and the rest of the developing world to address its effects. They are in a position to share their technological know-how to reduce vulnerability and increase adaptive capacities. Mechanisms ought to be established—quickly—to raise steady and reliable funds for the prime victims of the climate crisis, who will be poor and rural, very young, and, more often than not, female. And many of them will be African.

Africans cannot reverse global warming, but they can, while calling for urgent action by the largest emitters of greenhouse gasses, do their part. Right now, most governments' forest policies are not helping matters. Africa is home to about 17 percent of the world's forests. However, around half of the planet's
global deforestation has taken place on the continent, and Africa has the highest rate of deforestation in the world—currently losing approximately half a percent of its forests annually.

Industrialized countries should accept their moral duty to assist Africa and other poor regions to find alternative and renewable sources of energy—such as biomass, wind, hydropower, and solar—and enable the global South to participate in the carbon market so Africa can develop industries based on renewable energy sources. In 2007, global investors plowed $148 billion into new wind, solar, and other alternative energy initiatives.
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But those funds were almost wholly concentrated in the industrialized countries, along with some in China, India, and Brazil. Almost none of this investment is coming to Africa, despite the continent's vast energy poverty and abundant sun and wind. Africa's challenge lies in making herself a relevant beneficiary of these resources.

One exception, however, may be Algeria, which is already planning to export solar power.
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A huge $70 billion “super-grid” in the Sahara could provide Europe with up to one hundred gigawatts of clean electricity by 2050,
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while also supplying electricity for local consumption.
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Aside from further research into and development of these and other sources of energy, all nations must work to reduce their energy consumption and move beyond fossil fuels, to cut their greenhouse gas emissions from all sources, and to adopt policies so that corporations operate more responsibly wherever they are and individuals can live more sustainably. Otherwise, Africans will suffer even more from the consequences of overconsumption from peoples across the oceans. In the meantime, Africa must do her part. Indeed, it may be a good time to remind Africa that the United Nations Conference on New and Renewable Sources of Energy was held in Nairobi in 1981. It is a measure of the commitment to these issues that neither
the hosts nor the continent followed through with investments in research and implementation. Instead, they waited for technology and the means of mitigation and adaptation to be developed in continents that needed them least. Nearly three decades later, Africa finds itself in an even more vulnerable position. This trend is clearly unacceptable.

While the industrialized world can help mitigate the effects of climate change by supplying Africa with appropriate technology, the continent itself can do its part by prioritizing the protection and rehabilitation of its forests. All governments must make a concerted effort to stop unsustainable logging and find mechanisms, such as reforestation programs, whereby the poor can secure a livelihood by protecting and not degrading their environment. Well-managed, participatory tree-planting programs that serve as carbon offsets for industrial-country emissions are an important mechanism to support responsible global warming mitigation efforts in developing countries.

The Green Belt Movement, for example, is working with the World Bank's BioCarbon Fund through an Emission Reductions Purchase Agreement (ERPA) to continue reforestation efforts in Mount Kenya's and the Aberdares' forests, the
shamba
system notwithstanding. The trees that the Green Belt Movement groups plant will, according to World Bank estimates, capture 375,000 tons of carbon dioxide by 2017. In addition, these trees will restore the health of the soil, offer habitat for biodiversity, help regulate the local climate, support regular rainfall, and provide poor, rural people with a small income.

Partnerships such as this also present a challenge to NGOs when they work with international institutions or private-sector companies, some of which may have undertaken activities that harm the environment. It is my belief that, while it would be preferable to work with partners who are holistic in their approach to the protection of the environment, the reality is that many corporations, organizations, and governments are
not always doing the right thing. It is therefore necessary to work to assist in actively making a difference to the daily lives of the people in the region and, in so doing, preserving more forest.