Climate Change

News: 22.02.2024

The News and Events category publishes the latest News and Events relating to International Economic Law relating to Africa and the Global South. Every week, Afronomicslaw.org receive the News and Events in their e-mail accounts. The News and Events published every week include conferences, major developments in the field of International Economic Law in Africa at the national, sub-regional and regional levels as well as relevant case law. News and Events with a Global South focus are also often included.

Climate Action in Africa in 2024: Lessons to Draw from the Outcomes of the 28th Meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 28)

The first Global Stocktake took place at COP 28. The findings were concerning but not surprising. The Paris Agreement’s goal of keeping global average temperature well below 2oC above pre-industrial levels and aiming for 1.5oC remains out of reach. 2023 is set to be the warmest year on record. Only about one fifth of the total carbon budget for a 50% probability of limiting global warming to 1.5oC remains. Adaptation responses remain fragmented, inadequate, and unequally distributed.

Africa and the (Mis-)Promise of Green Finance

This post critiques the extent to which the present green finance rush embraces laws and policies that are largely externally motivated prescriptions designed, mandated, or foisted on resource-rich African countries through creative channels of geopolitical norm diffusion. These contradictions need to be questioned to avoid the charge of greenwashing.

Green Deals and Reproductive Justice: A Promise of Just Transition

Research has linked climate change and reproductive rights, as demonstrated by the increased exposure of women to sexual assault as they collect firewood or search for water. Such sexualized violence is prevalent in women-led rural households and highly vulnerable settings. For example, humanitarian contexts, slums, and arid areas have high rates of sexual violence due to water scarcity and poor lighting as women and adolescent girls travel long distances to access water. From an African socio-cultural context, fetching water and firewood are mainly feminine roles. Thus, energy distribution and water scarcity associated with climate change interact with gender dynamics to provide a setting for enacting sexualized violence. Freedom from sexual violence is an integral aspect of reproductive justice, a state where people have bodily autonomy and live in a safe and healthy environment that protects and upholds their reproductive rights and decisions. The question that arises is - can green projects, including the EU Green Deal, address climate change in a manner that addresses the associated sexual and reproductive justice issues in Sub-Saharan Africa?

The Political Economy of the European Green Deal, Neoliberalism and the (Re)production of Inequalities

While the law is to a large extent responsible for the overlapping social and ecological breakdowns, translating the above-mentioned principles into law means creating legal frameworks (through the interpretation of existing legal rules and principles and the creation of new legal instruments) that move away from the primacy of market logics and extractive profit-oriented economies embedded in colonial legacies, and reproducing gendered and racialized inequalities. It requires designing legal responses that would enable transformative ways of thinking about economies, justice, and our relationship with the non-human worlds, while embedding law and policies in truly democratic frameworks and practices. It means centering within legal thinking and legal practices the multiple forms of exclusions that are pervasive within and outside the EU, and that EU laws and policies often directly enable. Making a fair and inclusive transition happen requires bold choices and unwavering principles. Right now, the EU is quite far from embracing and practicing them.

European Green Deal, EU’s Global Gateway, and Financing for (un)just green transitions

In this contribution, we demonstrate how the so-called Green Deals initiatives which espouse an increasing drive to “catalyze” private financing by using public resources, including development assistance, may create perverse impacts on sustainable development in developing countries. The move may mean an overarching shift towards reliance on private sector to provide public infrastructure and services in ways that ensure a return for the private sector through buy-back guarantees and favourable contractual conditions. Such moves may create contingent liabilities on developing countries in addition to diverting public resources towards the private sector, including foreign investors, and undermining public oversight.

Global Justice and the Transition: Wellbeing and Differentiation

In this contribution, the author makes three claims. First, just transition interventions around the world are dominantly insular and ‘State-first’. The dominance of nationalist just transition policy making is evident in the America-first emphasis of the US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and the EU-first tilt of the European Green Deal (EGD). Second, the insular nature of just transition policies is hallmarking a new epoch of global injustice that, if not cauterized and dealt with early (if not already late), will become a major sphere of global inequality. Third, human and ecological wellbeing as an organizing principle, and differentiation as an implementation framework, will be key to any meaningful attempt to inject the ‘global’ into just transition.

Statement of the African Sovereign Debt Justice Network (AfSDJN) on the Occasion of the 28th Meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28)

Africa is grappling with a great number inequities in the climate change context. For example, despite having contributed the least to climate change globally (less than 4% of global carbon emissions), it is home to most of the world’s most climate vulnerable countries and yet it is struggling to mobilize the financial resources required to address climate change. The situation is more dire for fragile and conflict affected States. The average annual climate flows of USD 30 billion are far below the annual climate finance needs of USD 250 billion. Commitments made by developed countries to pledge USD 100 billion annually between 2011 and 2020, in line with their financial obligations under the international climate legal regime, were not met in any single year.

At the Intersection of Climate Change, AI, and Human Rights Law: Towards a Solidarity-Based Approach (Part 2)

Across the world, public attention has increasingly turned towards two challenges of global proportions: the catastrophic and unequal impacts of climate change and the kinetic development and deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. Driven by an extractivist growth-oriented economic system with roots traceable to the colonial encounter, climate change has left the world teetering on the edge of ‘irreversible’ breakdown, with marginalised communities particularly impacted by its inequitably distributed and existentially destructive effects. At the same time, fuelled by the extraction of vast amounts of raw materials and data, AI technologies have ushered in intensified forms of surveillance, control, and discrimination dominated by a small number of large technology companies, which have accumulated forms of ‘structural power’ that enable them to influence and circumscribe how communities, corporations and States interact and relate with one another. Despite the intersecting nature of climate change and AI technologies, policymaking has tended to remain remarkably compartmentalised. The EU’s Digital Services package, for example, is notable for neglecting to expressly confront the environmental and sustainability concerns of digital platforms. Where intersections are acknowledged, the relationship is often perceived to be harmonious – with AI invoked as a technological saviour for society’s ecological challenges. While amendments to the EU’s proposed AI Act signal some movement towards confronting the environmental concerns of AI technologies, tensions between the two tend to be defined in narrow technical terms focused on energy costs.