Abstract
Abstract Africa is affected by climate change in multiple ways. Like other continents, its coastline is in danger of being flooded, and its islands are in danger of being inundated. Many people are forced by climate change to migrate, and this increases the flows of refugees moving both north towards the Mediterranean and south towards the Cape, seeking a viable homeland. It is in the interest of African countries to develop in ways that are climate-friendly. More electricity needs to be generated to enhance people’s quality of life, but this should be generated in environmentally friendly ways. Large schemes of tree-planting are also needed, to restore the forests of areas where they have been lost in civil conflicts (as in central and northern Ethiopia) and at the same time to sequestrate some of the carbon dioxide of the atmosphere. As well as mitigation, collaborative efforts are needed in the field of adaptation, so as to limit the impacts of climate change. Developing countries should assist such measures, but they should be adopted whether or not such assistance materialises.
Highlights
Africa is undergoing multiple threats from climate change, and needs to reflect on policy options for responding to these threats
The difference capable of being made by African countries pales into insignificance beside the difference that developed countries plus China and India could make; Africans continue to suffer from climate change, without having made historically significant contributions to it
While it is hard to deny that reparations are due to many African countries for the harms perpetrated under colonial rule, international conferences are not prepared to make this explicit; yet at the same time their offers of funding to rectify some of the resulting suffering effectively amounts to acceptance in principle that a debt is owed to African and other developing countries by the developed ones
Summary
Africa is undergoing multiple threats from climate change, and needs to reflect on policy options for responding to these threats. Climate change causes an increase in both the intensity and the frequency of extreme weather events such as storms, hurricanes, floods, droughts and wildfires, and these derivative changes in their turn cause more than a few human communities to migrate to more hospitable regions, usually away from the equator and towards the poles, with many in Africa moving either north towards the Mediterranean or south towards the Cape of Good Hope. This in turn leads the vectors of diseases (such as mosquitoes) to extend their activities to higher altitudes and higher latitudes, adding to the problems already suffered by vulnerable communities and by healthcare staff (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2013). These phenomena are so widespread that governments need to take them into account, and consider remedial policies
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