Another COP, another ‘incineration pact’
Drop begging-bowl diplomacy and stress to richer nations that in a catastrophically hotter world, they will burn along with the rest of us.
Patrick Gathara
Meetings of the United Nations’ Conference of the Parties (COP) have become little more than talk shops where world leaders and climate activists fiddle while the globe burns. They are always preceded by dire warnings from scientists about approaching tipping points and the need for drastic measures to scale back global emissions but never end with the drastic actions needed.
COP15 in Copenhagen 15 years ago was a particular low point. As it approached, expectations were sky high that a political deal would happen. African countries took a common position and announced they were willing “to walk out of any negotiations that threaten to be another rape of our continent”. The president of the Maldives captured the prevailing mood when he declared: “We will not die quietly”.
Yet the “Copenhagen Accord” at the end of the conference was what Sudanese delegate Lumumba Di-Aping described as “an incineration pact”. The Africa common position had collapsed. Delegates at the conference reiterated the need to keep average global temperature rise to below 2°C but it ended with no commitment to doing so. In fact, one assessment of the emissions reduction commitments made by individual countries found that they would lead to nearly double that warming by 2100.
As yet another COP comes to a close in Baku, the globe needs to find another way of dealing with its climate issues as the urgent and existential threat they are. And that starts with how we talk about who faces risk.
At every conference, it is repeatedly emphasised that it is the countries that have contributed the least to the problem that are bearing the brunt of it.
While this is true, it has the unintended consequence of framing the issue as primarily a problem for the so-called Global South. The demands made on the industrialised world feel like appeals to their charity rather than acknowledgments of common destiny.
The comical scene in the documentary An Inconvenient Truth where the desirability of a pile of money is weighed against the planet is called to mind.
Africans need to stop talking about this as yet another edition of begging-bowl diplomacy and adopt the language of Di-Aping.
In the wake of the hurricanes that have battered the US, killing hundreds, the wildfires and drought that have ravaged countries across the West leading to steep food prices, it must be stressed that if nothing is done, we will all burn together.
And the blunt talk must start at home. Kenya’s president, William Ruto, has previously said that we should abandon the COP framework, but seems to have no idea of what comes next if we do.
Even worse, he has sought to frame the climate issue as an economic opportunity, suggesting we could profit from Western intransigence over emissions by monetising carbon sinks.
But we are not going to “grow” our way out of a wrecked climate. There is no profit to be made from ruining the planet. That is just another incineration pact.