By Matthew Abah-Enyi
One of Africa’s most widely embracing words of wisdom is the one that says he whose father was a victim of the preying lion would flee from the bush-rat that spots the lion’s type of hair stripes to avoid belated regrets after death. Poor and vulnerable island nations most of which are from Africa participating at the ongoing Conference Of the Parties to the United Nations Framework on Combating Climate Change (COP28) in Dubai need to be adroitly apprehensive and guided against a repeat of past diplomatic manoeuvrings around the conference tables that saw them going back home after the event with “hollow achievements”.
As negotiations on Climate Change dependent existential issues such as the national boundaries of island nations and the economies of sub-Saharan African countries are tabled and debated, African leaders must mobilize to avoid the hooks that carry the baits which lured them into grooving along the paths on which COP26 and the resultant Paris Agreement emanated from. On the pages of the Paris Agreement which were literally idolized by the industrialized nations even before it was made public, the word “Agriculture”, the main stay of African nations’ economies, employing millions of their citizens, was never mentioned, not even once. This was diplomatically fostered on the agreement’s pages at a time desertification was galloping at the speed of 0.6 kilometres per annum from the already conquered northern region of Nigeria towards its southern region in response to Climate Change effects, and Lake Chad’s shores were receding at alarming speed, all of which facts and figures had been unloaded on COP26 tables.
At the end of the summit, all that African leaders could point at in their bags as they returned home to their famished nations whose majority of citizens lived on less than one US dollars per day-far below the UN’s own recommendation for human life quality level- were the application of diplomatic yeoman-ship to placate the attendees. Loss and damages, the cliché for long overdue demand for funding empowerment for vulnerable nations to recuperate from years of onslaught of climate change disasters was ostentatiously GRANTED a new status called STAND ALONE!
Read Also; Wike defends over N61bn FCT supplementary budget expenditure
Indeed the continent has continued to stand alone as it has been buffeted by years of economic losses since the grant of the well sung status. National insecurity and insurgencies that have combined to threaten countries of the Lake Chad region’s existence on the world’s map have been nurtured to birth and find fertile recruitment grounds amongst youths rendered jobless and out of schools by climate change-hastened environmental degradation. African nations are presently entrapped in the crystal-coloured lullaby of submitting what amounts to their dizzying Internally Determined Reduction Plans and waiting for pass marks while about 80 percent of their population are not sensitized enough to comprehend the document.
Meanwhile, adequate funding of Loss and Damages recovery needs of Africa remains a mirage. The abysmal rate of the continent’s population’s awareness on climate change personal liabilities find rueful justification in the low level of their continent contributions to Worldwide Climate Change Gas Emission rate which stood at three percent at last time I looked.
The well-grounded reasons why African leaders and their climate change vanquished peoples must prepare for war without lethal weaponry but environmental activism on the scale of a social revolution, includes and mainly surrounds the facts and figures that have been unearthed by the theory of the Social Cost of Carbon (SC-CO2). The theory came about as a result of humanity’s need to make all-inclusive rules to guide the emission and reduction of carbon dioxide in view of the self-extinction roles its uncontrolled emission poses to life on earth’s surface. Upon scientific establishment of its possibility and urgency, the theory sought to establish the economic value of carbon dioxide emitted by a geographical entity or organization. Various aspects of life that impact on carbon dioxide production and emission were taken into consideration. Factors such as health hazards, economic losses suffered through agricultural losses and lifestyle enhancement ones such as heating and air-conditioning were all considered. Emissions were quantified in metric tons while the US dollar was the monetary value adopted. Scientifically powerful agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency of US were put together to establish the SC- CO2. Consequent to this endeavour, published documents on SC- CO2 for the years covering 2015-2050, calculated in 2014 at the unit cost of each metric ton established that in 2015, the cost per metric ton would be between $20 and $120 at various quantum of emission and discount rates; up to 2050 when it would cost between $29 and $240 per metric ton.
Very interestingly, based on this facts and figures, using the 2015 SC-CO2, at the average discount rate of 3%, at $40 per ton of emission, the United States of America, which emission figure for the year 2013 stood at 6,673 million metric tons of carbon was responsible for the total emission whose SC-CO2 stood at frightening figure I implore the reader to tap out on his or her calculating machine in view of its security implications. This was the background in 2016, when, the then election result humbled Barak Obama decided to undertake an act of constriction on the altar of the Green Climate Fund by ordering a remittance of $500 million being the second instalment of a $3billion commitment to a $200billion budget for climate change activities leading up to COP26.
Former president, Donald Trump’s consequent repudiation of the Paris Agreement, taken together with the end results of COP27, President Biden’s present body language and electoral rating as well as the Republican Party’s anti-climate change lobbies and antagonism towards climate change sciences are all germane issues African leaders need to put before themselves and dispassionately address behind closed doors as they hit Dubai and COP28. They are called upon to ensure their adequate representations at the all-important Agreement Drafting Tables upon which intangible “grants” as metaphor for failed ambitions can be dressed in the toga of COP26 “achievements”. In further justification for the clarion call for Africans to begin to prepare for a social revolution on climate change rights issues, the nexus between the quantum of greenhouse gases being emitted by supper polluters and the economies of vulnerable nations need to be highlighted even if belatedly for the recording cards of hunger-demobilized African environmental activists. As Nigeria’s Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala holds sway at the World Trade Centre, ensuring that only the right quality of products are allowed into the international market, her compatriot investors in Nigeria and other African nations continue to dig deep into their products quality enhancement and pay roll budgets to purchase diesel gas to power private sources of energy away from their epileptic national supply grids heavily crushed by inadequate generation and distribution fund.. On the other hand, the investor in China, USA, EU28, and the other 10 worst-polluter-nations in that order, continue to wax stronger at improving their products qualities in rest minded assurances of steady supplies from their national power grids that supply state-subsidised energy to weapons and air-conditioner manufacturing industries which combine to pump up to 70 percent of greenhouse gases into the collective atmosphere annually in vexatious comparison to Africa’s collective emission annual[ rate of less than 40 percent.
