Ticklish questions dominate pre-CCDA III Climate Justice Dialogue

Participants at a one-day dialogue on Climate Justice agreed that principles of equity and justice must become part of the global climate change negotiations, but could not all agree on the level of Africa’s commitment to climate change agreements.

Opening the dialogue, PACJA Coordinator, Mithika Mwenda, posed the question: ‘How equitable is the sharing of the global commons?’ He said a key question of climate justice is whether industrialised countries are meeting their commitments to African countries.

In his speech, the UN Economic Commission for Africa Deputy Executive Secretary, Dr Abdalla Hamdok, noting a trend to ‘shift responsibility to vulnerable groups,’ said that: ‘Africa has contributed the least to climate change but bears the brunt’.

The pre-CCDA III Climate Justice Dialogue was organised by the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance, the Mary Robinson Foundation-Climate Justice and the World Resources Institute.

Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland and President of the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice, asked why ‘a poor woman in Kenya who doesn’t drive a car should pay for climate change.’

Nevertheless, many delegates agreed that questions of equity existed not only between developed and developing countries, but also within individual countries, between rural and urban constituencies and between different economic sectors.

Mary Robinson said her foundation was focused on collecting true narratives on climate change and mobilising constituencies around the world to put pressure on their governments to ‘act now’. Applauding the angle taken by the former Irish president, another former president, Botswana’s Festus Mogae, said it was not just the developed countries that were to blame, though he noted that they had the ‘capacity to help Africa escape from the traditional route of using daily carbon energy.’ He added: ‘If only the international community would recognise that this question of equity is in all of our interest; it is not only we who would benefit, they would too.’

But, the former Botswana president noted, a lack of vision on the part of many African leaders meant that the continent could ‘miss the opportunity to develop clean technology.’

Throughout the day, participants from a range of African countries debated ticklish questions including Africa’s current need to make use of the continent’s endowment of fossil fuel sources, the question whether Africa, which has not benefited from climate change agreements, should commit to a ‘problem it didn’t create’, as well as the need to project African stories and narratives to ordinary people in countries where governments were reluctant to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol.

While opinion was split on some of these issues, there was general support for the view expressed by the Ugandan-based African Women’s Economic Network that there was need to record the voices of women, as representing the bulk of agricultural producers most affected by climate change.

During closing remarks, ACPC Coordinator, Dr Fatima Denton said it was important to ask ‘whose justice we are seeking and how we enable people who depend on natural resources as their main asset to harness it as their entitlement.’ She said it was important to look at the instruments, institutions and procedures that perpetuate the lack of equity in the climate change talks.

‘But it is not enough to talk about vulnerabilities and capacity. We also have to be able to know what success looks like and to measure success,’ Dr Denton said. The one-day dialogue was one of seven pre-events, held on the eve of the Third Annual Conference on Climate Change and Development in Africa (CCDA III).