African leaders slam West’s no-show at climate adaptation summit
Several African leaders have slammed wealthy countries responsible for most CO2 emissions for their absence at the Africa Adaptation Summit that was held in Rotterdam (5 September).
Speaking at the Africa Adaptation Summit in the Dutch port city, which comes two months before the crucial COP27 climate conference in Egypt in November, Senegalese President and African Union chief Macky Sall, and Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi expressed “a touch of bitterness [at] the absence of the leaders of the industrialized world,” With Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte being the only Western leader who showed up to the summit in person, the Senegalese leader noted that since Western countries “are the main polluters of our planet and it is they who should finance adaptation.” According to Tshisekedi, “the African continent has the smallest impact on climate change, but paradoxically suffers the majority of its consequences.” Sall also warned that “not just the fate of Africa that is at stake but the fate of humanity and the future of the planet.“
Meanwhile, Director-General of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has stressed the importance of the “free flow of trade” in Africa to help achieve the goals of global climate change. “You cannot really talk about adaptation without considering that you need a free flow of trade. Because you might have the finances but if trade policies are not right, those who need new technologies for adaptation — if there is no free flow of goods and ideas — may not be able to use the money to get at it,” said Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala.
The summit, the first to focus on helping Africa adapt to the fallout from climate change, brought together the African Union, the IMF and the Netherlands-based Global Center on Adaptation. African nations agreed at a summit in Gabon last week on a common push to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius — a goal that scientists fear is increasingly elusive — at upcoming UN climate talks.
