Rich Nations Put Global Warming Burden on Africa

By Elizabeth Bast and Roxanne Lawson, TomPaine.com. Posted December 6, 2006.

The effects of the Great Warming are not fairly shared. Fourteen percent of the world's population lives in the 57 countries on the African continent. However, because the majority of Africans live with little to no access to electricity and personal transport usage is among the world's lowest, Africans contribute only 3 percent of the global greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

The United States, conversely, with only 5 percent of the world's population, contributes nearly 25 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas pollution annually. In the United States, with our consumption of electricity, our ecologically harmful industries and our 230 million passenger vehicles, we are literally fueling the destruction of the planet's environment.

Last month, at the United Nations Climate Change summit in Nairobi, Kenya, climate change experts from around the globe reported to 165 countries on the impacts of global warming, which will be felt most harshly by poor developing countries. If that weren't bad enough, the former World Bank chief economist Sir Nicholas Stern recently released a report that suggests that global warming could shrink the global economy by 20 percent over the next 50 years. From the report and the summit, it is clear that climate change is as much a humanitarian, security and economic issue as an environmental one.

Unfortunately, some of the world's richest countries and major polluters -- Australia, Canada and the U.S. -- failed, at the summit, to address the most urgent needs of the world's poorest countries. Climate change has already caused significant damage on the African continent and it is now agonizingly clear that a lack of action by the world's major polluters to reduce global warming pollution will, in short order, devastate the globe. "I do not see any change in our policy," said the United States' senior climate negotiator, Harlan Watson, days after the conference began. "We feel very comfortable."

According to the hundreds of scientists and other experts on the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global warming will create dramatically increased droughts, water shortages, coastal floods and disease for Africans.

The changes from the Great Warming are already being felt in many places. The people of northern Kenya, for instance, are still suffering today from a drought that started in 2003. Kenyan pastoralists have lost 10 million livestock, and two-thirds of the population in the Turkana region has lost their livelihoods.

In Nigeria, severe flooding in the Niger Delta has become more frequent, with floods wiping out crops and disrupting traditional farming practices. In Tanzania, one third of the ice field peak of Mount Kilimanjaro has disappeared in the last 12 years; 82 percent of Kilimanjaro's peak has vanished since it was first mapped in 1912.

Global warming has also caused changes in weather patterns that have and will continue to disrupt livelihoods across the continent. Declining crop yields in the next 20 years will lead to more famines and deaths. Droughts and increasing desertification mean smaller areas of viable farm land and an increase in forced migration to more densely populated areas. The results of global warming will inevitably heighten resource scarcity and fuel conflict and war.

Meanwhile, in some African countries, the oil, gas, mining and other extractive industries that support the consumption habits of the United States and other rich countries contribute to global warming. Nigeria, South Africa and Angola are all nations with comparatively high greenhouse gas emissions by African standards.

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Elizabeth Bast is an International Policy Analyst at Friends of the Earth-U.S. Roxanne Lawson is an International Policy Campaigner for Friends of the Earth.

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