Yes, this whole week I was stuck in conferences telling me the world is going to burn in the next 50 to 100 years. And the rising oceans will act as a temporary cool-down – but then we will drown as they rise a bit too much. Bye-bye Manhattan. Bye-bye Cape Town. Bye-bye London. Depressing. Not really. As you all know I am a natural optimist. I know that we will find a solution. We’ll just first go through all the other bad options before we do the right thing. But I am still stuck on what we can do in Africa. And I can’t find a solution. I think we are stuck in a Catch 22 situation on dealing with climate change in Africa. We are stuck – each time we find a solution it forces us back to our starting point.
I know I have argued that people will first look at the things that will kill them immediately – health, food and war. But the climate change will affect Africa and the impact will be felt way more than in any other region. The impact will be disproportionate. Why? Because we live such a marginal life – always on the edge. And the only way we can survive is through ubuntu – supporting each other with the little we have. This social safety net is build with little chain links that helps us stay connected to each other and connected to life. We only have each other to depend on and our social safety net is each other. When this break we are pretty… hum… stuffed (sorry, wanted to use a harder word). We have seen it when these safety nets break – Ethiopia in the 80′s, Somalia in the 90′s, Sudan today. The impact is so much worse than anywhere else. Because people can’t share anymore. There is just nothing to share. And people die. Climate change will have a huge impact as we will see consistent crop failures and the breaking of the social safety net. We will help each other until there is nothing left to share. And then we die. So climate change is important. But I just can’t see a way out of it. I just can’t see a way of dealing with it in Africa. How to get beyond where we are.
The first problem is dealing with the money that would be needed to fight climate change in Africa. It isn’t as easy as we think. More aid? Maybe. But from where? One of the proposals is that some of the money that comes from carbon trading should be diverted to Africa’s fight on climate change. I have a problem with that (no surprise there). There will not be enough money generated from carbon trading to deal with Africa and all the other areas that needs to be dealt with. So where will the money come from? More aid from the US and Europe? That could work. Couldn’t it? No.
Aid money is needed for the first fight – HIV/Aids, TB, malaria, food, water, etc. All these areas are already underfunded. So any aid going to fight climate change will be money that should go to the first group of priorities – things that are killing people today. Even if we include the funding in projects aimed at sustainability – farming, manufacturing, trade, investment – the money will still be a diversion from the main aim of improving Africa. And we just don’t have enough money going around at the moment. Look after the first things first. Once that is done you can look at climate change – but not a minute earlier. And we know that adequate aid (and trade) ain’t gonna happen soon.
So what do we do if we get the money from somewhere (and somehow)? How would we spend it? We struggle with basic capacity in Africa already. We struggle to get the medicine to people even if we get medicine for free. We can’t help all the farmers become more efficient even if we get the funding that is needed. We have a lack of capacity to do some of the basics – where do we get the capacity to deal with climate change? Do they want us to hire some more of those western consultants to help us out? Divert some more money away? And what do they know? They can’t even solve it in their own country where they have all the solutions already – how are they going to solve it in Africa?
And what about the infrastructure? We are so behind in providing the infrastructure needed to run our countries – how are we going to build infrastructure for climate change? We have coal – not wind-farms or geothermal. I can picture it now – a huge wind-farm right next the coffee farmer in Ethiopia. That ain’t gonna happen soon either. We have to build the roads before we can build the wind-farm. Shouldn’t we?
Even if we get all that sorted (how I don’t know) – should this be the priority for governments? Can we just get them to govern a bit more efficiently first? Their priority should be to start governing and not to talk about things that removes them even further from the people. They should get their priorities straight. Govern first. Plan for tomorrow next. And then plan for the long term. But first things first, thank you.
Sounds pretty awful doesn’t it? Each solution offers a new challenge that brings us back to our starting point. How to deal with climate change in Africa. Catch 22? More money needed… but elsewhere. More capacity needed… but elsewhere. More infrastructure needed… but elsewhere. More governing… but elsewhere. I just don’t know what the answer is. And, in all honesty, I haven’t seen or found a solution that seems to do the work. Nothing has convinced me yet. But I am convinced of one thing though. That in the end the African people will find a way through this. They will find a solution. They always somehow manages to find solutions when they face the most impossible situations. Throw a war our way – we’ll get through to the other side. Colonize us – we’ll survive. Crops fail – we’ll share the little we have. HIV/Aids killing people – we’ll look after the kids. Somehow we find a way forward.
Catch 22? Not really. That book was written by an American. More like A Long Walk To Freedom if you ask me. But please, just not Things Fall Apart.
March 2, 2008 at 9:46 pm
Sir, I have been spending much of my brain space contemplating these issues. Being a food/livelihoods type of person, I have been focusing on just food and livelihood issues. The issue of sea level rising and desertification scares the shit out of me. And that’s food security alone.
I am not an optimist either. We are going to have a holocaust. A slow unfolding one. People will survive, but more many more will die.
March 4, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Focus on the soil. Africa has depleted soils and poor farming practices overall. It imports over 30% of it’s calories yet exports agricultural products to the North.
Terra Preta or biochar has the potential of radically transforming the productivity of Africa’s farmlands. There’s a test project in Kenya, check that out.
sources here:
ttp://terrapreta.bioenergylists.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permaculture
Don’t look offshore for anything but information. We can’t manage ourselves and our economies appear to be crashing. Good luck.
March 6, 2008 at 3:48 pm
Ah Climate Change isn’t an issue that humans are effecting significantly. The planet is changing because of the Solar cycle. The UN scientists have this one wrong. And wouldn’t a warmer earth promote crops and wouldn’t a warmer earth put more ocean water into the air for more rain. Wouldn’t a cannal provide water and transportaion. Are we are not going into gobal cooling with excess amount of CO2 in the air
March 6, 2008 at 6:02 pm
I suggest you check out the Holistic Management International website: holisticmanagement.org. We are regenerating soils and grasslands on some 30 million acres of lands in Africa, North and South America and Australia through Holistic Decision Making. Working with nature and managing to a triple bottom line to implement policy and actions that are sound; financially, socially, environmentally, short and long term. As Pangolin suggested “focus on the soil” – and also on the well-being of people, other fauna and flora, the dynamics of the natural and man-made community, the effective functioning of the water cycle, effective cycling of minerals, and effective gathering into life of the continuous energy flow from Sun to Earth. We can make better decisions. Decisions that sustain and enhance life.
March 14, 2008 at 2:54 pm
Since the whiteys left, Africa’s slide downhill has escalated.
Zimbabwe is a a prime example.
When it was Rhodesia it exported food, created jobs and provided clinics and schools for the poor.
Today the country is trashed.
From time immemorial, black tribes wandered across the face of Africa, killing the men of other tribes, raping their women and stealing their cattle.
Nothing much has changed since then – they’re still busy in the DRC, Kenya…the list goes on. As black tribes invaded other territories, they left nothing behind.
However, when the white tribes arrived, they built schools, roads, hospitals, airports, they introduced arithmetic and fried chicken.
But the world insisted that black tribesmen should have the vote and in so doing signed their death warrant.
The first thing the black tribesmen did was get rid of the whiteys who controlled the police and army and prevented all the fun of raping and pillaging.
But unlike the black tribes, when the whites were forced out they left behind a useable infrastructure most of which has been destroyed in the time since MacMillan made his “winds of change” speech.
On a recent trip through many countries in Southern Africa, the degradation and collapse of infrastructure is becoming increasingly evident.
The situation appears to be irreversible.
A couple of years of drought, increased cholera, yellow fever and aids could see an incipient collapse and death on a scale never before contemplated.
The situation is made worse by overpopulation, the chopping down of trees for firewood, over-grazing and a general ignorance of basic farming methods.
But hey, the guys can vote!!
I suppose they will vote Bob Mugabage in again and then whine to those ugly American whitey farmers and Brits for free food hand-outs.
Any wonder why most thinking people all over the world are becoming increasingly tired of dealing with these heathen savages.
March 15, 2008 at 10:40 pm
The best of Africa, the most educated, the most innovative, have huge incentives to leave Africa. The brain drain affects everybody in the less developed world but Africa’s among the hardest hit.
But Ireland has proven that even centuries of brain drain can be reversed in a few short decades if you change your laws and provide a climate that allows the innovative, the well educated, the hard workers to earn good money and you allow a generous return policy (Irish passports could be had if you were 1/4th Irish, just one grandparent).
If you can make money in a spot through honest work, if you can get into the country and be admired and not spat on, money, people, and talent will come and give you brand new economic problems (the good kind like how to adjust to all this new found wealth and economic growth).
There does seem to be a way out of the catch-22 of Africa but africans are going to have to choose to implement it. I do wonder if they will.
March 24, 2008 at 12:21 am
well done, guy