An open letter to COP27 African delegates

In less than a month, the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) will take place at the Sharm el-Sheikh Climate Change Conference in Egypt. This open letter addressed to the COP27 African delegates offers suggestions on negotiating with your counterparts, especially those from the Global North.

From history, we learn how western colonial powers used blank treaty forms to strip Africa of its resources – we should not allow history to repeat itself. So, I urge you to be strategic in your negotiations.

I strongly advise you work towards decolonising the climate change narrative by amplifying your black and brown voices. It would be best if you don’t commit to a target without fully costing its impact on present and future generations of Africans. Africa must present a united front by embracing the spirit of pan-Africanism to negotiate from a position of strength. Individually, we might be small, but when we combine our 54 voices, the world will have no choice but to sit up and listen.

Africa’s starting point should be from the premise that the Global North started the crisis and should bear the responsibility for resolving the problem with zero cost to Africa and other countries in the Global South. The west has had over a two-hundred-year head start ahead of the rest of the world by reaching an advanced stage of development by exploiting the earth’s resources.

The current discussion regarding financing climate adaptation and mitigation in the Global South is the form of climate finance and aid from the Global North. The most prominent is the $100 billion annual commitment made at COP16 in Cancun in 2010 and at COP21 in Paris in 2015, where developed countries agreed to provide $100 billion yearly up to 2025 to developing countries. As of the time of writing, this commitment is yet to be fulfilled. However, this pledge, of which $20 billion has been earmarked for Africa, is grossly inadequate, and Africa and the Global South should reject it.

The west often implements policies with little consideration of their impact on low-income countries in the Global South. A typical example is a call by western governments and standard setters to end the financing of fossil fuels. If this policy is implemented, countries like Nigeria, which generates 40 percent of its GDP, and 95 percent of its foreign exchange earnings from the oil and gas sector, will be economically castrated. We should also be cautious of increasing our debt load to transition to Net-Zero.

According to Oxfam, around $24 billion of the climate finance loans granted to developing countries were offered on strict terms requiring higher repayments from low-income countries.

I suggest that climate wealth distribution should be the anchor of your negotiating strategy at COP27. It would be best if you let the west know that Africa does not need their aid and loans but wants environmental and economic justice in the form of compensation for the harm the west has done to the environment for 250 years and for the opportunity cost of abandoning a growth model which the west enjoyed via its use of fossil fuel. Therefore, I propose a climate wealth distribution scheme that accounts for the 250-year head start western countries enjoyed while exploiting the environment.

Here is how it will work: If Africa is expected to decarbonise in 30 years by forgoing fossil fuels, in that case, it will be at a competitive disadvantage relative to western countries.

Therefore, an option to consider would be implementing a scheme that will compensate the Global South for pursuing a net-zero policy through a climate wealth transfer from the Global North to the Global South.

(Avg per capita West – Avg per capita developing) Population developing

In this way, Nigeria, a country reliant on fossil fuel with an average per capita of $1,969 relative to the west’s average per capita of $44,107, would receive an $8 trillion transfer from the Global North as compensation for decarbonising. As a collective, Africa would receive a $57.8 trillion wealth transfer from the Global North.

In response to this suggestion, they may tell you that the proposal is unreasonable as the total global economic output is around $100 trillion. However, you could say to them the suggestion is not as ludicrous as telling Africa to engage in self-immolation in the quest for a Net-zero transition.

According to the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, half of the planet must be kept in a natural state to address the biodiversity and climate crises. To make this a reality, there is a proposal to protect 30 percent of the planet’s land and ocean by 2030 at the forthcoming United Nations Biodiversity Conference in Montreal in December 2022.

At face value, the 30×30 concept seems to be an intergovernmental initiative involving over one hundred countries working towards curbing climate change. However, since most of the biodiversity hotspots are situated in the Global South, the protected land scheme could lead to a large-scale land grab in the Global South.

Carbon offset schemes give large western organisations a licence to pollute while offsetting their carbon emissions with reforestation and conservation projects mainly located in the Global South. This could lead to a race to the bottom to use the protected lands of the global South to fortify their green credentials.

According to research by ActionAid, Shell’s plan to reach net-zero emissions by 2050 by offsetting 120 million tons of CO2 from its polluting activities would amount to the acquisition of 12 million hectares of land by 2030, leading to aggressive land grabs in the Global South. African delegates could tell the Global North that rather than using our land for its carbon offsets scheme, it should convert its 4.3 million hectares of western lands to forests and allow the rest of the world to use western land and forests for carbon offsets.

Many thanks for taking the time to read my letter. I trust you will take on board the suggestions highlighted above. Hopefully, future generations will remember COP27 as the climate conference where Africa straightened its back and said, “On Our Terms.” Selah

Sule, a social commentator, writes from Lagos