Ripping the title from Charles Dickens book, Great Expectations, is a way to capture the anxious mood infusing the world as the climate Conference of Parties meet for the 26th time (COP26) in Glasgow this week. Scenes from one of Dickens greatest novels, may be fiction but the climate crisis is not so fictional for poor countries trying to hold rich countries to their grand bargain: to put the money on the table having sequestrated the global carbon space so selfishly for their own economic growth over the last hundred years.
With current nationally determined voluntary contributions submitted by governments we are overshooting the 1.5 degree mark and will likely reach 2.7 degree above norm temperature range – Saliem Fakir @AfricanClimateF
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But, like young Pip- Dickens’ main character- being poor is a peril and makes you vulnerable to all kinds of bad phenomena and characters. Pip tries to work his way out of rural poverty seeking hope and new dreams in metropolitan London. Great Expectations is a story that has an unhappy ending – in which people suffer physically and have their hopes dashed.
Poorer countries face a Damocles sword moment: walking bare clothed, poor, ravaged by COVID, trying to eke meagre crumps from well-oiled (no pun intended) rich countries to pay-up and reduce their fossil fuel guzzling habits egged on by exuberant subsidies (running at $600 billion or so per annum) to producers and having to find hope given they have to carry the worst of outcomes from climate vulnerability in which wafer-thin promises upon promises of common but differentiated responsibilities (a key principle of the Paris Agreement that the rich will support the poor) have largely been -well!- more empty promises.
Like Great Expectations there are a cast of characters, the usual suspects and new voices, engaging what the philosopher Timothy Morten suggested, the impossible Sisyphean task of trying to control the velocity of a ‘hyper-object’ ( the climate crisis) a thing that we are entangled with as humans, because we produced it, but yet so beyond our seeming reach and capacity to solve that we may be pretending that we have a solution. Or those pretending to solve our problems have no intentions to do so except that which pertains to their own people and territories.
Progress on global collective action to deal with climate change is a necessity and the last UN report on where we are at shows that we are not close to meeting the targeted emissions by 2050 – we are way off kilter. With current nationally determined voluntary contributions submitted by governments we are overshooting the 1.5 degree mark and will likely reach 2.7 degree above norm temperature range.
The fact remains that for developing countries, the most poorest and vulnerable, success for them at COP is to get out of the COVID, push for greater allocations in various global climate funds for adaptation (which requires substantial resources for developing countries and remains poorly funded) and win some ground on an issue making little traction such as paying for the loss and damage as a result of extreme weather such as drought, cyclones and floods.
The other big issue is net-zero targets: which some view cynically as a delaying tactic to avoid hard targets in the short-term. Perhaps, another promise of action in the future but really amounts to kicking the can down into the future and not committing to radical shifts in the immediate.
Africa can do a lot more to generate our own resources for climate action. We shouldd rescue climate as a captured turf of environmentalists and rewire it as part of economic recovery, adaptation and resilience in long-term development plans – Saliem Fakir @AfricanClimateF
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Be that as it may two key global economies – the biggest emitters and industrialised economies can solve this if they can work together: China and the USA. The two countries combined military budgets are around $1 trillion/year which demonstrates where our priorities are these days. The Cold War between them and even a Cold War between Republicans and Democrats within the US is all limiting the prospects of joined up efforts within the US and between the US and China as unlikely to be good news at COP 26. In any case, Premier, Xi Jinping is not coming to Glasgow.
The US itself does not have a net-zero target and enters, all guns blazing to reclaim loss moral high-ground, to the COP with low trust and being seen as a serial misfit on account of who wins the US presidential elections given how Trump summarily tore up the Paris Agreement returning the US back to the dark ages.
This is the backdrop for the climate negotiations. You would lose hope if you ceded you entire future to the Paris process. On the continent we can do a lot more to generate our own resources for climate action. This can happen if we if we rescue climate as a captured turf of environmentalists and rewire it as part of economic recovery, adaptation and resilience in long-term development plans.
African economies should move away from a model of engagement on climate issues that has the tone of development assistance dependency but engage a new transformative climate diplomacy that integrates climate issues such as adaptation and mitigation as part of its economic growth and diversification. We should place hope in our own hands and increasingly use regional mechanisms and tools to build pooled resources and capability to tackle climate challenge.
Saliem Fakir is the Executive Director of a new climate philanthropy called the African Climate Foundation.
