Climate Change and the Developing World
A Look at the Effects of Climate Change on Africa
Nov 19, 2008
Though, the developed world is the primary consumer of non-renewable energy, the impact of this is hardest felt by the developing world. In the article, 'Low Carbon Growth: Our ethical Responsibility’ in the April 2008 edition of Development Outreach, James Sweeny draws attention to the fact that most energy consumed comes from non-renewable energy sources. In the US, renewable energy such as hydroelectricity and biomass only make up around 7 percent of energy used; wind and solar only making up 0.35 percent.
Deputy Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, Mr. Takatoshi Kato, at the Fourth Tokyo International Conference on African Development in May 2008 pointed out that Africa is the most vulnerable to its effects with the expected increase in severe droughts and aggravated food shortages as a result.
Food Insecurity
In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth assessment report confirmed what many environmentalists had worried about for about a decade- Africa’s defenselessness in the face climate change owing to its dependence on rain-fed agriculture and her inability to respond appropriately to the challenges it poses. The 2007 United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report stated that 600 million people face the risk of malnutrition owing to collapsed agricultural systems if nothing was done about climate change.
Liliana Carvajal in an occasional paper, ‘Impacts of Climate Change on Human Development', written for the 2007 Human Development Report indicated that climate change has had a profound effect on human livelihood. Carvajal noted “worldwide the annual average number of reported droughts has increased more than three-fold since the 1970s. …The 2000-2006 period saw an increase to 119 droughts, 46 of those in Africa, 34 in Asia and 12 in Europe.” She also noted that many of Africa’s food scarcities- that have required large external aid -may be credited in varying degrees to acute weather events.
The Way Forward
Dealing with the issue of climate change is not as simple as reducing the carbon emissions of developed nations. Developing countries themselves have begun to increase their energy demand but, do not have the same access to- or resources for- clean energy technology. In ‘Low Carbon, High Hopes: Making climate action work for development’ which appeared in the April 2008 Development Outreach, Mohammed Valli Moosa argued that a different approach has to be taken when taking into account low carbon growth rates. For instance, you cannot categorize China, India and Brazil in the same category as the countries in sub-Saharan Africa although they are all developing nations. Their access to resources and technology as well as their energy consumption is very different.
The reality remains that poverty reduction and increased production capacity remain the key concerns of developing nations particularly in Africa. Undoubtedly, increased energy production would assist in meeting many development goals but, at the same time it must be understood that the cost of clean energy is beyond what most African countries can afford. In the wake of the 2008 global economic meltdown it is highly unlikely that many countries- developed or otherwise- would spend too much time considering the environment. Early global response to the crisis could change the status quo: resources for clean energy and improvement of energy production technology could be written into the packages that are expected to change the face of our global economic system.
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