How Africa got short end of the stick at climate meet, again
Jacqueline Koin, a Maasai climate and gender activist at COP28 in Dubai in December 2023.
What you need to know:
- This, however, is not the first time that African delegates are complaining about the outcomes of these global negotiations.
- The Nation team covering the Dubai talks has also noticed a discrepancy in how African delegations are pushing their agenda at the talks.
In Dubai, United Arab Emirates
The African Group of Negotiators (AGN) has expressed its collective frustration over the slow pace of deliberations and decision making at the COP28 summit in Dubai, and now say the annual conference is at risk of becoming a talk-shop that is designed to disadvantage the continent.
Citing a $100 billion loss and damage pledge by the global north during the COP27 meeting in Egypt last year that has not been delivered yet, the AGN said yesterday that the pledge has so far crossed the $800 billion mark, but Africa is yet to receive a single coin from it.
As a result, the AGN is now considering declaring COP28 a failure if the global summit is unable to complete the work undertaken for the past two years under the Global Goal on Adaptation, which is considered by many as the most important outcome for Africa at the Dubai talks.
Since the summit opened its doors for negotiations on November 30, a series of pledges on finance, food systems, renewable energy, cutting the use of coal, backing the use of nuclear power, and vows from major oil and gas companies to cut carbon dioxide and methane emissions have dominated discussions.
“We’re disappointed by the lack of progress on this important issue in the first week,” said Mr Collins Ndhlovu, Minister of Green Economy and Environment in Zambia who is also the chair of AGN on climate change. He cited the lack of commitment by the Global North to commit money to adaptation programmes in Africa as the biggest failure of the talks so far.
African negotiators travelled to Dubai with the singular goal of pushing for the West to send billions of dollars to the continent in adaptation and financing funding, which forms the backbone of the Nairobi Declaration of the African Climate Summit hosted by President William Ruto in Nairobi in September this year. That, however, has not happened, and desperation and tempers are starting to creep in among the African delegations.
Now, says the AGN, the goal of doubling adaptation finance from 2019 levels by 2025 “is an undertaking on paper”, and is wondering: “How are we to cope with the persistent droughts, the devastating storms, and rising seas which threaten our very lives and livelihoods?”
This, however, is not the first time that African delegates are complaining about the outcomes of these global negotiations. Since the first COP meeting, held in Berlin, Germany in March 1995, these negotiations have become a key plug-in for the international climate policies as enshrined for the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). And, every year, Africa seems to come out of the them with the short end of the stick.
While the talks have been hailed for contributing to a variety of milestones, their design and landscape have also been blamed for offering fertile grounds for the furthering of selfish interests by industrialised nations over the years. That spectre is playing out in Dubai, where powerful nations and fossil fuel lobbyists are pushing narratives against Africa’s adaptation funding goals. Africa, therefore, might not leave Dubai with the billions it came seeking.
One of the negotiators, whom the “Nation” is not identifying to protect him from a possible backlash, said he is worried that the COP negotiation processes have become such a messy multilateral landscape that is ridiculously antagonistic and entrenched by powerful forces pulling strings behind the curtains.
“I can for sure tell you that the Global South nations have very minimal control and determination of what goes on inside the COP negotiation rooms,” said the source, who, as a designated member of country Party delegations, sits in these negotiations.
“Majority of the decisions made on thorny issues are often determined during late-night meetings in corridors or dinners, or unilateral agreements made outside the plenary discourses and later forced onto the majority.”
Thus, the polarisation of the COP negotiation processes, especially in the conflicting interests of the industrialised and low-developed countries, has over the years degraded the level of debates in such processes now riddled with significant transparency issues as some blocks organised parallel meetings intending to come up with predetermined outcomes.
The Nation team covering the Dubai talks has also noticed a discrepancy in how African delegations are pushing their agenda at the talks.
Crucially, while most developed nations sent to Dubai teams of environmental negotiation specialists, meteorologists, policymakers, and scientists, the African delegations are comprised mainly of professional negotiators, some with very little understanding of the variety of issues that arise in the global climate summit negotiations.
As a result, the African delegations are getting overwhelmed by the unrelenting pace and complexity of both the subjects and the negotiation processes.
For instance, the “Nation” has learnt that during the seventh day of the Dubai talks, while the African delegates were busy following published schedules in various conference rooms and country pavilions, their counterparts from some of the biggest fossil fuel economies were hunched behind closed doors pushing for the expunction of paragraph 35 of the energy package in the Global Stocktake.
The delegates, mainly from China, India and Arab groups, including Saudi Arabia, extensively campaigned for the deletion of paragraph 35 of the energy package that calls on countries to take further actions towards tripling renewable energy capacity globally by 2030, compared to the 2022 levels, to 11,000 gigawatts; and doubling the global average annual rate of energy-efficiency improvement compared to the 2022 levels by 2030.
The document also calls for substantial scaling up of zero- and low-emission technologies, including capture, utilisation and storage, and low-carbon hydrogen production.
The third option calls for an orderly and just phase out and fossil fuels; accelerating efforts towards phasing out unabated fossil fuels and rapidly reducing their use to achieve net-zero CO2 emissions in energy systems by or around mid-century. It also suggests the rapid phase-out of unabated coal power this decade and an immediate cessation of the permitting of new coal power generation plants.
Former US Vice-President Al Gore has waded into this controversy, poking holes into the lack of transparency by, especially, Arabi countries’ commitment towards the fossil fuel phase-out.
“I’m hoping that at the end of COP28, there is enough outrage around the world at the obscene structure of the conference’s decision-making process, with reported use of the preparatory meetings to sell more oil and gas,” Mr Gore said.
And so Africa, clutching on nothing but hope in Dubai, watches on as the West and Arab nations move closer and closer to having their way at the talks. It came here hoping to getting billions to repair the damage climate change has wrought upon the continent, but so far it has received very little substantial commitment, and its delegations are starting to protest.
This report was produced with support from MESHA and IDRC Southern Africa office.
