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The Global South is angry and mistrustful - Ian Bremmer
Frustrated with the lack of equitable access to vaccines, economic challenges, and climate change impacts while wealthier countries fail to fulfill their pledges, the Global South is angry and mistrustful, said Ian Bremmer, president of Eurasia Group, during a Global Stage livestream event at UN headquarters in New York on September 22, on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly.
"They feel like their agenda is irrelevant, that they are the takers, not in any way the collaborators or makers on the rule space and how we're going to deal with global governance challenges," Bremmer says.
Its leaders, however, have already started acting to position themselves as key players in the global governance discussions. Before the United Nations General Assembly, dozens of world leaders met for the first-ever Africa Climate Summit in a bid to take agency. They are set to advance the conversation at the COP28 in Dubai next month.
The discussion was moderated by Nicholas Thompson of The Atlantic. It was held by GZERO Media in collaboration with the United Nations, the Complex Risk Analytics Fund, and the Early Warnings for All initiative.
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Kenya's President William Ruto, flanked by African leaders, addresses the media after the close of the Africa Climate Summit in Nairobi.
African leaders call for global carbon taxes
One of the big questions hanging over the historic African Climate Summit in Nairobi this week was: Where’s the money going to come from? After all, switching to sustainable energy sources and coping with the worst effects of climate change is expensive, and while African nations suffer disproportionately from the risks — droughts, conflicts over scarce resources, irregular migration — the continent receives just 12% of global financing to tackle the problem.
The summit’s solution? A global tax on the trade and use of fossil fuels. The levy would raise money for climate action, especially in poorer nations, as well as to reduce borrowing rates for lower income countries struggling with high debt burdens.
Global taxes are a tough sell of any kind, as they require lots of coordination and compromise. But if the African proposal can get buy-in from heavyweights like the US, EU, and China, it will have a shot.
Next up? The African proposal will be a major part of the UN’s upcoming COP28 summit on climate change in the UAE this November.
Climate activists gather in Nairobi, Kenya.
What Africa has to say about climate change
Dozens of world leaders are currently meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, for the first-ever Africa Climate Summit. While these gatherings often serve as mere talk shops, this summit represents a symbolic opportunity for the continent to lead on an issue that overwhelmingly affects its 1.3 billion people.
And there’s plenty of hype to back it up: An above-the-fold headline in the Daily Nation, a Kenyan daily newspaper, proclaimed this gathering as “Africa's moment.” Some big news has already come out of the summit, which ends today, but not everyone is happy about where things stand.
What’s on the agenda and what’s at stake?
The view from Africa. Africa is the world’s fastest growing continent, but it’s also the most vulnerable to the whiplash of a warming planet. Indeed, of the 20 countries hardest hit by the climate crisis, 85% are in Africa, US climate envoy John Kerry said this week.
Seeking to be a regional leader on the issue, Kenyan President William Ruto, who came to power in 2022, has made climate change mitigation – and accountability – a cornerstone of his foreign policy. Addressing the conference on Tuesday, Ruto claimed that climate change is crimping the continent’s economic growth by 5-15% annually, despite the fact that the continent accounts for less than 4% of global emissions.
But the focus of the summit, as laid out by the host, is not to reinforce a sense of victimhood, but rather to flip the script so that stakeholders come to see resource-rich African states as crucial stakeholders in the green economy. (Consider that despite the region’s abundance of natural resources, it accounts for just 3% of global energy investments.)
So far, what’s come out of the meeting? Large economies appear to be throwing money at the problem. The US, for its part, pledged $30 million to help the continent deal with climate-induced food insecurity, about one-third of which will go towards finding technical solutions to food scarcity and storage. Meanwhile, the EU pledged €1 billion ($1.08 billion) to make emerging African markets more attractive for foreign energy investors.
But perhaps the biggest news came from investors in the oil-rich United Arab Emirates, who announced a deal to buy a whopping $4.5 billion worth of carbon credits from the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative, which was formed last year to expand the continent’s involvement in the voluntary carbon trade market.
"The main takeaway so far is the deepening of relations with the Middle East on climate issues," says Franck Gbaguidi, a climate and energy expert at Eurasia Group, adding that "the goal is to develop 15 GW of clean power [in Africa] by the end of the decade."
Recap: What are carbon credits again?
Carbon credits are part of a broader cap-and-trade scheme that, in theory, aims to minimize global greenhouse gas emissions. These are most commonly used by companies that get a number of credits – each one equal to one ton of carbon dioxide – which can then be used to sell and trade excesses with other companies through clean investments in things like renewable energy or forests.
Take one recent example, whereby a group of Saudi companies purchased a whopping $2.2 million tons of carbon credits, 70% of which were linked to African projects, including a scheme to supply environmentally friendly cookstoves to communities across Kenya and Rwanda.
Still, many people aren't on board with this approach. Around 500 people marched in Nairobi on Monday to protest the carbon offset scheme. They say that carbon credits are used by Western corporations to further their own bottom lines while doing little to minimize dirty emissions. They’ve also raised questions about a lack of transparency and questionable quality of some of these investments.
What's more, in the lead-up to this week's event, activist organizations condemned the summit for backing “false solutions,” calling instead for climate reparations and debt relief as a way to reconcile the burden faced by emerging markets as a result of rapid development in the West.
Looking ahead. The Africa summit is just round one. In November, delegates from around the world will flock to Dubai for COP28, the annual UN Climate Conference, and regional African heavyweights want to make sure that their voices have been heard.
"There's a strong sense that the topic is becoming a top priority for many African governments and heads of state are trying to speak with one voice ahead of COP28," Gbaguidi says. Yet, while "they are all on the same page regarding the need for more climate finance ... they are more divided, however, regarding the pace of decarbonization -- Kenya, the host, is the most ambitious country here," he says.
Still, a huge chasm exists between expectations and reality. A recent report by the Climate Policy Initiative found that $277 billion annually is needed to help the region meet its 2030 climate goals. That’s a lot more than the $30 billion currently flowing into the continent each year.
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