How to not solve Climate Change – COP27 the step-by-step guide

-

 

After high expectations from the build up to COP27, also advertised as ‘Africa’s COP’, the outcome was rather disappointing. As the deadline of the Paris Agreement looms around the corner, this years’ COP27 has failed to go beyond the promises of COP26 and has announced no new targets. The talks were mainly dominated by negotiations for a compensatory fund for developing countries meant to promote climate justice, a very significant point from an Africa oriented perspective, seeing as Africa is set up to suffer the most repercussions of climate change despite being the smallest contributor to it. This ‘loss and damage’ discussion failed to set up such a fund during COP26, however this year it seems we were provided with a ‘de jure’ agreement. Sunday morning it was announced that members had agreed on setting up the fund HOWEVER, there are no further details, which suspiciously sounds like a ‘business as usual’ situation. No information was provided to say who will pay, how much and who will have access.

Just in my last post we discussed issues of safe water access, of worsening sanitation conditions in the face of climate change that are happening NOW, not in 2030, not in 2050, and yet it appears that not enough action is being taken, but rather goals are renegotiated to no avail every year, while the emissions are still rising making the 2030 targets more and more unrealistic.

To quote a scientist you might have heard of ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.’ – A. Einstein.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Is groundwater the key to environmental change in Africa?

-
Image
This post will explore the effects of environmental change on groundwater and groundwater recharge rates, their relationship with climatic regions, land-use change, agriculture and finally discuss how they might be incorporated into adaptive strategies to climate change in Africa. Roughly  50% of Africa ’s population relies on groundwater stores as their main water supply, placing groundwater at the center of the water and environmental change in Africa discussion. It has already been established that annual runoff and groundwater recharge are  more sensitive to the distribution of rainfall events , rather than the total annual runoff. Recharge rates have a positive response to extended and moderate rainfall events, and a negative response to both extreme rainfall events (high flood risk) or low intensity rainfall (increased evaporation rate). As discussed in the last blog post, climate change is projected to cause extreme weather events, such as more intense rainfall that w...
Read more

Managing water resources & Environmental Change

-
So far, we’ve tackled many ways in which environmental change will impact water and development in Africa, however we’ve neglected the stakeholders in charge of the management of these water resources. In this post I will be discussing the relationship between environmental change and water resource management and debate different approaches to water management. An  adaptation to climate change in Africa study  concluded that climate change is likely to be responsible for the displacement of agriculture and water resources thus affecting economic investments and stakeholders. The paper also outlines that the most critical need in Africa is organization to ensure the promotion of ‘sound adaptive strategies in the context of sustainable development objectives’ and that oftentimes community and civic groups lack the appropriate funding, technology, and personnel to achieve the same goals as centralized or private management. However, is this always the case? Different papers on t...
Read more