How Will Africa Weather Climate Change?

             COP26, the international climate conference, has begun, but what will it mean for an African continent bearing the brunt of climate change, yet needing to catch up with much of the rest of the world in industrialization, which would be inherently polluting?

Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change, opened the conference, saying the devastating loss of lives and livelihoods this year due to extreme weather events clarifies how important it was to convene COP26 despite the impacts of the pandemic still being felt.

"We are on track for a global temperature rise of 2.7C, while we should be heading for the 1.5C goal. Clearly, we are in a climate emergency. Clearly, we need to address it. Clearly, we need to support the most vulnerable to cope. To do so successfully, greater ambition is now critical," she said.

In the case of climate change, Africa is vulnerable as we continue to witness because it is exposed to damaging climate risks including extreme droughts, flooding and storms.  The continent's biggest environmental challenges are water pollution, air pollution, and droughts, which directly impact the health of Africans.

Since the 2015 climate conference that produced the Paris climate accord, there has been almost constant discussion of what should be done to mitigate a warming climate that can be clearly seen in Africa, such as in the melting ice cap on Mt. Kilimanjaro and eroding beaches along African coastlines.  A lot of pressure, much of it internal, has been exerted on the United States government, but not much has been levied against China and India, producers of pollution levels that exceed the United States.

In fact, if you look at how the 36 signatories of the Paris accord have performed in living up to the goals since the accord was finalized, you find surprising results.  Perhaps the most surprising is that only one country is meeting its target: The Gambia.  Four other African countries are rated by Climate Action Tracker as being almost insufficient: Ethiopia, Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria.  Meanwhile, South Africa, the United States, the European Union and other individual nations have been rated as insufficient.  Still, that’s better than China, India, Brazil and others rated as highly insufficient, or Russia, Saudi Arabia, Singapore and others rated as critically insufficient.

African governments seem to be taking the effort to rein in climate change as more critical than major industrial powers, even though they have no clear path to industrialize without polluting, as the major powers did long after the Industrial Revolution ended.

Following the onset of European colonization of Africa in the 19^th century, the countries on the continent were then prevented from benefitting from the Industrial Revolution that began in the late 18^th century and transformed largely rural, agrarian societies in Europe and America into industrialized, urban ones, creating what we now call the developed world.  Africa’s taste of development went only so far as the colonial powers that built and managed the factories, connected the electrical systems and installed other technology and then dismantled it, even the light bulbs in the fixtures in some cases, when they left as colonialism ended.  Admittedly, Africa’s heyday was mostly in the distant past, but even so, there is a basis even in recent times for a “recovery” for African infrastructure for manufacturing.

“Physical infrastructure covering transportation, power and communication through its backward and forward linkages facilitates growth; while social infrastructure including water supply, sanitation, sewage disposal, education and health, which are in the nature of primary services, has a direct impact on the quality of life,” stated the Deloitte report “Addressing Africa’s Infrastructure challenges.”

In the “August-September 2016 issue of African Renewal, Masimba Tafirenyika wrote that Africa is less industrialized today than it was four decades Ago.

“In fact, the contribution of Africa’s manufacturing sector to the continent’s gross domestic product actually declined from 12% in 1980 to 11% in 2013, where it has remained stagnant over the past few years, according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA),” he wrote.

Tafirenyika cited the Economist Intelligence Unit, the British research firm, which estimated at the time that Africa accounted for more than 3% of global manufacturing output in the 1970s, but this percentage has since been halved. It warned that Africa’s manufacturing industry was likely to remain small throughout the remainder of that decade, and it has.  

For more than a century, European nations colonized Africa countries and plundered not only agricultural resources such as cocoa, but also resources such as gold and ivory.  When other nations around the world entered into the Industrial Age, refining natural elements into more value-added states, Africa was denied making that leap.  As a result, elements such as cocoa were sold in the raw state and had to be repurchased by the countries that produced it in the first place as processed goods.  That situation is not limited to African countries, though, as other developing countries have experienced the same phenomenon, but there is a movement to encourage value-added processing in Africa, which would require significant industrialization.

            Even after colonialism, studies have shown that countries rich in natural resources are more likely to be poor.  Partly this is because of an over-reliance on commodities whose prices can fluctuate wildly, but also because control of the exploitation of such resources belong to whomever discovered them and can afford to utilize them, usually foreigners or a small group of elite Africans.  Moreover, they usually don’t produce as many jobs as one might think.

High commodity prices triggered by China’s seemingly insatiable appetite for natural resources have fueled rapid economic growth in Africa since the 1990s. But while many thought the boom would revive Africa’s waning manufacturing industry, to the dismay of analysts, it failed to live up to expectations. Instead of using the windfall to set up or stimulate manufacturing industries, African countries – with a few exceptions – wasted the money on non-productive expenditures. Ghana and Zambia, for instance, used profits from the commodity bonanza to solve short-term domestic problems, such as by increasing salaries for civil servants. 

A new study, published this past May in Nature Climate Change, used machine learning to examine more than 100,000 scientific papers worldwide. The study was conceived as a way to see if machine learning could help the work of the UN's climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, by making it easier to examine and analyze the thousands of paper scientists currently examine by hand. 

The study authors divided the world into smaller grid cells, and calculated the number of climate studies that studied climate impacts in those areas.  They found far more climate studies had been published on impacts in developed countries than developing countries.  For example, nearly 30,000 studies looked at areas in North America. Only 10,000 studies looked at Africa, which has more than double the population.

Since 2006, Ethiopia’s manufacturing sector is estimated to have expanded by an annual average of more than 10%, albeit starting from a very low base, partly because it has courted foreign investors, noted The Economist in an article earlier this year, and yet the country has done relatively well in terms of mitigating the pollution that presumably accelerates climate change.  A few other African countries listed previously also are doing relatively well with meeting climate goals while industrializing at least to some extent.

A country like The Gambia, which is far from an industrial power, has the advantage of not opening numerous new factories – at least not yet – but what will happen if they do?  Developed nations such as the United States pollute far less in recent years because of advanced technology and trained, experienced technical workers.  Africa lack both, and if they obtain these benefits in order to increase industrialization, will they get the same free pass China, Russia and others now receive?  We’ll see.