According to the Cambridge dictionary, globalism is “the idea that events in one country cannot be separated from those in another and that economic and foreign policy should be planned in an international way”. At first glance, this appears to be a rather benign concept that can even be seen as beneficial when applied to commerce, or in the context of universal human needs like water, human rights and health. However, when it is applied in the context of natural resource management and conservation, it is a delusion that takes on a malevolent quality, threatening sovereignty, resource rights, climate resilience and even the health of hundreds of millions of people around the world.
By and large, globalisation has been a positive human development, but it has spawned a cruel child that follows the same economic strata in the pursuit of power, fuelled by the climate crisis and perceptions thereof. It is instructive to note that the stratification occasioned by environmental globalism places the Global South firmly on the bottom rung. This is the core injustice, because nations of the Global South are custodians of over 75 per cent of the world’s biodiversity and produce less than 50 per cent of total global emissions.
The most powerful and destructive quality of environmental globalism is its capacity to confer acceptability, normality, or even invisibility to the most egregious violations of human rights and sovereignty. This delusion played out blatantly at the Africa Climate Summit 2023 held in Nairobi from 4 to 6 September 2023. The summit was touted as a meeting where “the world” (read: the Western capitalist world) would acknowledge (and somehow reward) Africa’s role in conserving biodiversity and mitigating climate change.
The situation on the ground, however, was very different, because the discussions centred around “carbon markets” and other amorphous financial instruments. These were accompanied by the usual platitudes and lip service to the injustices and suffering in Africa caused by climate change for which the continent only has five per cent responsibility, based on their proportion of global emissions. Like clockwork, the African leaders present came out, cup in hand, pleading for a share of this amorphous thing referred to as “climate financing”, forgetting that these wealthy nations have only made good on 12 per cent of the climate financing commitments made in Paris a decade earlier.
So what was the purpose of this meeting, given that there was so much repetition of what had already been promised earlier and remains unfulfilled? Everything was rehashed, including the typically shrill crisis speeches from the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Gutierrez. An examination of the background information on this meeting reveals that it was more of an “assignment” given to Kenya by the Swedish government, which also financed the meeting. The brief to the Kenyan government was simple: herd, or otherwise coerce, as many African governments into a common position in support of the West’s position in preparation for COP 28, the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference – or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC – to be held in Dubai from 30 November to 12 December 2023.
A key part of that “common position” has been the repeated absolution of the West from blame for the irreparable harm done to the global environment since the Industrial Revolution. It is a position that was repeated throughout the summit, in the media communiqués, television adverts, and in the final declaration. As an African society that aspires to justice, however, it is incumbent upon us (and the wider global community) to recognise that this is a position that has no moral, scientific, or logical standing. Even more perplexing is the fact that the countries seeking to absolve the West from responsibility for the environmental crisis are the same ones expecting various forms of reparations from them for the same environmental impacts; just one example of the cognitive dissonance that is typical of the conservation discourse.
All isn’t lost, though. If one looks past the propaganda being put out by the BBC and other Western media outlets about the climate summit, it is obvious that the loud references to “Africa” in the communiqués and headlines are greatly exaggerated. Kenya’s President William Ruto, the summit host, read out the “Nairobi Declaration” at the end of the summit, outlining several demands and proposals on behalf of “Africa”, despite the fact that, of the 54 countries that make up the continent, only 14 heads of state were in attendance. It was a sad day for Kenya when we bought into, and became purveyors, of the intellectual contempt that is so typical of Western attitudes towards Africa. It is the idea of “Africa the village” where countries, communities and individuals are assumed not to have individual needs, aspirations or ideas.
This continent is a land mass of over 30 million square kilometres, stretching from the temperate Mediterranean zone in the north, across the tropics to the temperate cape, south of the Tropic of Capricorn. A continent of 1.3 billion people. Why would African countries have a common position on environmental issues at COP28 (or on anything else, for that matter)? Surely, the environmental conservation priorities of Algeria in the Sahara Desert cannot be the same as the priorities of the Democratic Republic of Congo covered in tropical rain forest, and home to the world’s third-largest river by volume. Most of the countries that skipped the summit didn’t bother explaining why, but Nigeria, Uganda and South Africa made their positions known. According to a Kenyan diplomat, Nigeria didn’t want to come and be “a bystander at the summit while being lectured by the worst emitters” (of greenhouse gases). Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni refused to attend because of (US climate envoy) John Kerry’s involvement in addressing Africans yet he was a citizen of the “world’s biggest polluter”. South Africa didn’t come because they are currently facing an electricity power crisis and they are being pressured to give up coal, one of their most important energy sources. So what, pray, was the purpose of this strange function in Nairobi?
It was a sad day for Kenya when we bought into, and became purveyors, of the intellectual contempt that is so typical of Western attitudes towards Africa.
This meeting, the platitudes, the posturing, the electric vehicles and propaganda had very little to do with the environment. It was simply global geopolitics. Very few people would fail to notice the massive global power shift to the East over the last two-three years in terms of commerce, innovation, industry, and other fields. Western power in the 19th and 20th centuries was built and maintained on the back of the military industrial complex, but this primitive, blunt tool can no longer ensure dominance in a complex, informed world. “Concern for the environment” is the only remaining tool that the West has at its disposal to try and achieve anything approaching the hegemony it used to exercise over the Global South, particularly Africa.
The duplicity of creating and pushing “carbon markets” while continuing unabated with their industries and emissions has a two-fold benefit for the Global North, if it succeeds. Firstly, they can slow down development and maintain dependency in the South by curtailing the use of natural resources and using these countries as “carbon sinks” for Northern excesses. Secondly, they can conjure up a position of leadership based on non-existent environmental stewardship, in spite of their being the world’s top emitters and consumers. This “leadership” is exercised on global platforms, particularly the UN, which has fully adopted the crisis narrative.
This country has a less than stellar record of environmental leadership: failing to enforce our most basic laws, the wanton destruction of tree cover, the dumping of toxic waste, and cities choking in refuse and sewerage. The choice of Kenya certainly couldn’t have been based on our credentials as a nation, so why was the Africa Climate Summit held here? The choice was more likely based on Kenya’s characteristically blank policy slate onto which foreign interests can be stencilled as and when needed. Where the chosen tool is conservation, Kenya provides the best “entry point” into Africa because of our inability to separate conservation from foreign tourism, and our official obsession with the latter.
The duplicity of creating and pushing “carbon markets” while continuing unabated with their industries and emissions has a two-fold benefit for the Global North, if it succeeds.
As early as 1972, the Guyanese scholar and Pan-African thinker Walter Rodney said that international imperialism was turning Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania into “wildlife republics” where “every effort was made to attract tourists to look at the animals, and the animals assumed priorities higher than human beings…” He went on to refer to tourism as one of the new areas of “expansion of the imperialist economy” and a new way of confirming the dependence and subjugation of Third World economies. Tanzania and Uganda developed their own political and cultural identities over the decades, but Kenya excelled in the role of “client state”, making us the preferred choice for Western projects.
What, then, did we gain from the so-called African Climate Summit? Environmentally, nothing at all, but we learned that our continent is the custodian of the resources on which the world’s future depends. Hopefully, we also learned that Africa’s future belongs to the nations that are committed to their own people’s needs and aspirations.
