Summer school to provide Africa with a pool of climate activists

Climate justice is no longer an abstract concept; it is now a global public agenda. [iStockphoto]

Delivery of learning has often taken place through formal centres such as schools, colleges or universities. However, things do not have to remain thus.

Challenging the norm is the Nairobi Summer School on Climate Justice, a partnership between the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance and Kenyatta University. The university is hosting the Nairobi Summer School on Climate Justice for the second year running.

“The whole idea of the Summer School is to bring together young and vibrant activists, practitioners and champions of climate change to share their ideas and experiences on the effects of global warming, hence climate change and variability,” said Charles Mwangi, the Alliance’s Acting Executive Director.

When first mooted, the summer school targeted the African youth climate activists. However, since the first call early last year, applicants from as far as Colombia, Chile, Argentina, the US and Europe expressed interest to participate.

According to Dr Dorcas Otieno, the Unesco Chair on Higher Education Development for a Green Economy and Sustainability (HEDGES) at Kenyatta University, climate justice explicitly addresses gender inequalities, racial justice issues and distributive justice.

The Mary Robinson Foundation defines climate justice as linking human rights and development to achieve a human-centred approach, safeguarding the rights of the most vulnerable people and sharing the burdens and benefits of climate change and its impacts equitably and fairly.

According to Dr Joseph Kurauka, the Chairman of the Department of Environment and Community Development at Kenyatta University, the summer school will change the pedagogy of training climate change advocates and defenders.

“We want to ensure it retains its multidisciplinary, transdisciplinary and multi-stakeholder approach for collective action in addressing climate crises and injustices,” he said.

Further, Dr Otieno said it is crucial that the African youth learn early that women and men experience climate change differently, a fact that will help in the designing of interventions.

This is particularly important when it comes to access to climate finance. According to Dr Otieno, while applying a gender lens to climate finance is increasingly recognised as key to effective climate outcomes, it remains challenging for women’s organisations to participate in climate finance processes or access funds.

Dr Otieno disclosed that a number of studies had shown that women were more likely to die in a climate disaster, be displaced by climate change, or die from pollution.

“Climate impacts are more likely to affect poorer women and women with disabilities. Poorer women tend to be dependent on natural resources for their economic activities,” she said.

The Summer School on Climate Justice holds at a crucial year when Africa is preparing to host the 27th Conference of Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) in Egypt in November.

Mr Mwangi says climate justice is no longer an abstract concept; it is now a global public agenda.

However, voices from the Global South, Africa in particular, where climate injustices prevail, remain inaudible in global discussions. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports showed Africa as being at the forefront of climate impacts. The data has laid bare the sad reality that the situation is getting worse year after year.

UNABATED TEMPERATURE RISE

According to recent IPCC reports, warming projections under medium scenarios indicate that extensive areas of Africa will exceed 2°C by the last two decades of this century, relative to the late 20th Century mean annual temperature and all of Africa remain under high emission scenarios.

The reports further indicate that it is likely that land temperatures over Africa will rise faster than the global land average, particularly in the more arid regions, and that the rate of increase in minimum temperatures will exceed that of maximum temperature.

This unabated temperature rise can only mean more frequent drought occurrences and erratic rainfall patterns, which translate to famine and loss of lives (a packet of maize flour in Kenya costs almost $2 today).

Arid and semi-arid regions in Kenya account for 80 per cent of the country’s total land mass, and the pastoral communities living in these areas lose their livestock daily. Women and children hardly get enough to eat and have no access to clean drinking water. This situation is common across Africa.

Academicians and philanthropists from the Global North generally shape the narratives and debates on climate justice, with limited presence and representation of the Global South, especially the voices of frontline communities, who bear the devastating impacts of climate change.

The partnership between the civil society organisation and Kenyatta University is expected to offer climate activists the needed evidence, innovation and technology in their advocacy on climate justice.

As envisioned in the Paris Agreement’s component on capacity development/building, not all developing countries have sufficient capacities to deal with many of the climate-related challenges. This is more pronounced in Africa, where financing climate change has remained a problem.

During the COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, in decision 2/CP.15, in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation, developed countries committed to jointly mobilise $100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries resulting from climate change.

The theme of this year is “Enhanced Capacity for Youth on United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Process for Influential Advocacy Engagement in Cop 27.”

Parties decided that this funding would come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance, and that new multilateral funding for adaptation would be delivered through effective and efficient fund arrangements, with a governance structure providing for equal representation of developed and developing countries.

The same promise was repeated in Cancun, Mexico, through decision 1/CP.16. But to date, these two decisions have remained promises. To save face, during the COP26 in Glasgow, UK, last November, high-income nations pushed this promised target of $100 billion of climate finance to 2023.

It has since been made clearer to Africa and the African Group of Negotiators that a strong civil society movement capable of putting governments to task and reminding them constantly of their responsibilities in tackling the climate crisis is inevitable.