When the young Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate went to Davos last year, she found herself cropped out of a news photograph of four other climate campaigners, including Greta Thunberg. “They hadn’t just cropped me out,” she wrote about the snub. “They’d cropped out a whole continent.”
Africa’s 54 countries have contributed almost nothing to climate change. Today, they account for about 2-3 per cent of global carbon emissions and 1 per cent of cumulative emissions. There is no great urgency to cut Africa’s carbon output. Even if it fell to zero tomorrow, the world would hardly notice.
Yet, because most African nations lack the financial clout to deal with the fallout of climate change, Africans will be among the world’s most affected people. Just as Covid-19 has left the continent reeling from a pandemic that started elsewhere, so African countries are among the most threatened from shifts in weather patterns they played no part in triggering. Read more>>
