There is no doubt that the so-called developing countries, the majority of which are in Africa, Asia and Latin America, will suffer the worst impacts of climate change. However, these countries have cumulatively, contributed the least to global warming.
It would seem perfectly sensible that the developing world should demand that the so-called wealthy nations who have prospered using cheap, polluting fossil fuels pay for losses and damages from extreme climate events.
Wealthy nations should make scaling up adaptation finance. Moreover, wealthy nations have an obligation to provide unfettered access to clean energy technology as well as create the mechanisms for rapid transfer of capacity of clean technology to developing countries.
Countries like China and India, which are huge emitters of greenhouse gases, argue that they should not be subjected to aggressive emission reduction timelines. Their point being they need to continue burning coal so their populations have access to affordable energy.
Furthermore, phasing out the use of coal and a rapid transition to clean energy sources is viewed as punitive, obstructive to the national development goals and aspirations. In short, middle-income countries believe they have a right to pollute their way to prosperity, just like the wealthy nations of the western hemisphere.
Here in the developing world, we are innocent victims of the prodigious consumption of polluting fossil fuels by the industrial west. Somehow, we feel that our path to clean energy and decarbonisation should not be mandated and subjected to timelines and monitoring of Nationally Determined Contributions. NDCs are essentially efforts or activities undertaken voluntarily by each country to cut or reduce national emissions and adapt to climate change.
Under the NDCs it is generally accepted that peak greenhouse emissions will take longer for developing countries. For example, Kenya is under no obligation to commit to a net-zero emission timeline. Timelines will consider equity and national poverty eradication efforts.
According to the Paris Agreement, it is solely up to each country to prepare, communicate and maintain successive NDCs that it intends to achieve. More importantly, obligations to NDCs builds a ratcheting up of aggregate and individual country ambition over time.
What is the point of all of this, you may ask. The point is that the developing world must be willing to take some responsibility and commit to tangible early action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Granted our peak emissions are still many decades away but it is the aggregate, cumulative greenhouse emissions by all countries that now imperils our kind.
Tropical deforestation contributes about 20 per cent of annual greenhouse gas emissions. Second only to China. Deforestation accounts for 70-80 per cent of Brazil and Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions. Africa lost an estimated 3.9 million hectares (39,000 square kilometres) of forest cover between 2010 and 2020. An area equivalent to seven per cent of Kenya’s landmass.
The developing land, without holding out a begging bowl, can do so much through land use and energy policy to halt deforestation. We owe posterity to act responsibly.
The views expressed are the writer’s
