The Africa Climate Summit will be held in Nairobi from September 4 to 6. Why, the Earth is warming fiercely that no one can deny it. Twenty years after Jacques Chirac's speech in Johannesburg at the Fourth Earth Summit in which he warned against a horrifying apathy in the face of the catastrophe that was already looming, the heatwaves in various parts of the globe are proof of a sad normalisation of the effects of climate change.
Kenyans are indeed witnessing a climate disruption in which the exception is gradually becoming the rule. They are not the only ones. Everywhere in Europe and beyond, the same causes are producing the same consequences: The accumulation of heat linked to human activities is progressively making cities inhospitable, weighing on health and essential resources, which are now subjected to unprecedented stress. Everyone's house is burning – often literally.
Global warming deniers have certainly lost the game, as evidenced by the spectacular, albeit belated, progress in awareness of the structural threats linked to global warming. Their defeat, however, is a poor consolation in the face of crisis after crisis. Two battles must now be waged simultaneously instead of one: the reduction of CO2 emissions as well as the fight against their already devastating effects.
The urgency leaves little room for fatalism. It is deplorable that the efforts of the country that is the biggest polluter per capita, the United States, are currently being hampered by pure ideology or clientelism, abated by her Supreme Court decision restricting the action of the US Environmental Protection Agency to put strict measure on carbon emissions.
It's a race against time where the rules have been the same for decades. As climatologist Valérie Masson-Delmotte, one of the members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said at one summit “We are trotting slowly" behind a climate that is changing at full gallop.
The Africa Climate Summit reminds us that African states' response is "progressing" but remains "insufficient". Africa is still a long way from the immediate and widespread measures that the IPCC demanded in April 2023 in order to "guarantee a livable future".
In this respect, UN secretary general Antonio Guterres and France President Emmanuel Macron's call for energy efficiency on July 14 is certainly welcome, but it is regrettable that it is more a result of tensions over France's fossil fuel supplies due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine than of an assertive climate policy.
However, circumstances must be used to realise the indispensable and certainly costly changes in people’s lifestyles that the situation requires. For example, France's Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne has now adopted a "radical" approach to the issue, which can only be a good thing, but her role demands it of her. Every decision taken by her government must now be measured against that yardstick.
More than ever, they have to explain relentlessly to citizens to avoid social tension adding to the difficulties. It is better for people to understand in advance than understand only once they see the devastating effect of climate catastrophes demolish humanity.
National organising secretary, Ford Kenya
