Climate deception in the name of action

Developed countries are now shifting their responsibility for climate finance to larger developing countries, private sector, and market forces

The Africa Climate Summit held in early September revealed all that is wrong with how the climate criT sis is being tackled. The African continent has contributed the least to historical emissions only around 3% or so, and hence has nothing to do with the climate crisis. In fact, Africa is a major victim of its fallout. In sub-Saharan Africa alone, 600 million have no access to electricity. Consequently, the focus should have been on their "adaptation" to climate change, on loss and damage and on ensuring "new and additional financing", as per UN Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and Paris Agreement. But the focus of the Africa Climate Summit was on "mitigation" since it suited the developed countries.

What was even worse was that instead of acknowledging the historical responsibilities of the developed countries and focusing on meeting their own immediate 2030 Paris mitigation targets (which they are nowhere near to meeting), the developed countries focused more on setting up an African carbon market where they will sustain or even increase their own emissions by buying carbon credits from African countries, who will be obliged to cut down their emissions! For example, the UAE Carbon Alliance announced an agreement to buy $450m of carbon credits by 2030 from the African Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI). The message is simple: You small emitters cut emissions, so that we big polluters can keep polluting. Civil society has condemned carbon credits as "neo-colonisation".