7 December 2011
analysis
“Africa’s share has remained at about two per cent of CDM (Clean Development Mechanism) projects officially registered with the UN’s climate change secretariat. If South Africa and countries in North Africa are taken out of the aggregate, all the other African countries currently account for just 0.6 per cent of registered CDM projects.”
But even in carbon markets in Africa were expanded, argues this new comprehensive study from the Institute for Strategic Studies, carbon offsets at best bring only deceptive benefits to developing countries, while allowing rich countries to evade their responsibilities for reducing carbon emissions.
The report, entitled Carbon Trading in Africa: A Critical Review, and edited by Trisha Reddy, was released in November. In addition to three overview chapters and concluding recommendations, it contains detailed summaries of existing offset projects in South Africa, Uganda, and Ethiopia; a chapter on the World Bank and forest projects in Africa; and an incisive critique of the inherent flaws in carbon offset markets, noting their “un-regulatable chactacter” similar to that of the financial derivatives markets. The result, notes leading expert Larry Lohmann in that chapter, is “regulation as corruption,” in which those presenting carbon offset projects essentially make up plausible but unverifiable scenarios comparing the carbon impact of projects with the counterfactual scenario of the project not happening.
The full report, a fundamental resource on the subject, is available as a pdf download at http://www.iss.co.za/pgcontent.php?UID=31241
This Bulletin, available on the web at http://www.africafocus.org/docs11/clim1112b.php but not sent out by e-mail, contains the text of Chapter 2, with an overview of carbon trading in Africa to date as well as a review of pending projects.
Another AfricaFocus Bulletin with several recent documents on climate change is being sent out today by e-mail and is also available on the web at http://www.africafocus.org/docs11/clim1112a.php
For previous AfricaFocus Bulletins on climate change and the environment, visit http://www.africafocus.org/envexp.php
For an earlier report on carbon trading as a false solution, see http://www.africafocus.org/docs10/can1012b.php
Editor’s Note
Climate change and carbon trading in Africa
Yacob Mulugetta
in Trisha Reddy, ed., Carbon Trading in Africa: A Critical Review. Institute for Security Studies Monograph 184, November 2011
[Note: chapter text only. Notes for chapter available in pdf at: http://www.iss.co.za/pgcontent.php?UID=31241]
Introduction
Africa has gained few benefits from economic globalisation, and the continent’s economies continue to depend on a handful of primary goods whose prices are determined externally. This unjust allocation of resources, access, and development extends to climate policies in that Africa’s interests have remained peripheral to their implementation. The introduction of carbon trading schemes has arguably not transferred finance or technology to Africa. Just two per cent of projects under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), the main carbon market resulting from the Kyoto Protocol, are in Africa, and if South Africa is excluded, a mere 0.6 per cent of these are in sub-Saharan Africa.
With carbon markets driven primarily by commercial interests, most CDM credits are awarded for simple changes to reduce industrial gases other than CO2. The manufacturing facilities that generate these gases are not found in Africa. While hydro power, the other major source of CDM credits to date, is the most common form of electricity generation in sub-Saharan Africa, this results in an assumption that the energy mix is already clean. Simply put, sub-Saharan African countries are not deemed to be dirty enough, or to consume enough, to compete successfully for CDM projects.
Partly in response to these failures, CDM reform is being discussed at UN climate negotiations. However, the approaches favoured in these talks could exacerbate rather than ameliorate the problems associated with carbon trading. One of the main proposals is to replace a project-based approach with one that encompasses entire economic sectors. However, this does not solve the basic problem of carbon ‘offsetting’, namely its lack of environmental and social integrity. Nor would a sectoral approach address the geographic imbalance in favour of middle-income countries.
A second scheme that is heavily linked to carbon markets is Reducing Emissions from Degradation and Deforestation (REDD). However, this could introduce a series of additional problems, including the displacement of forest-based communities, and a financial incentive to replace complex forest ecosystems with monoculture plantations. Serious doubts also remain about the ability to account for emissions ‘savings’ from REDD. Thus far, the evidence shows that carbon trading is an ineffective way of addressing climate change, largely helping powerful governments and business executives to meet the demands for action on climate change while preserving the commercial and geopolitical status quo.
This chapter probes these issues by placing climate change in its historical and political context. This may help us to understand why and how carbon trading falls short of addressing carbon mitigation efforts, and limiting the effect of climate change on livelihoods in Africa. It then discusses the marginalisation of Africa in the carbon market. Finally, it explores some future trends in the African carbon market.
The historical and political context of climate change
The historical legacy of unequal access to resources and unequal development demands an open debate about the causes of anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, how past and future emissions are likely to be allocated, and what interventions are required to engage in a meaningful way with CO2 stabilisation efforts. Placing the climate discussion in its historical (and political) context has two important functions. Firstly, it helps us to appreciate the origins of the problem and the possible effects of global warming on present and future generations, thus situating local impacts firmly in global politics and economics, and helping us to discuss inequality in a concrete way. Secondly, it helps us to explain the evolution of social and environmental systems while explicitly considering relations of power, thus providing a platform for challenging dominant accounts of environmental change.1 The argument here is that environmental change and ecological conditions are fundamentally linked to broader economic, social and political processes in which the ‘triple inequality’2 of vulnerability, responsibility, and mitigation are embedded.
It is worth focusing on ‘responsibility’, given that an agreement in this area would constitute a first step towards arriving at ‘fair’ solutions. The advocates of industrial progress saw nature as a source of unlimited resources to sustain development, with an infinite reservoir for waste. This extraction-dumping paradigm involves a highly unequal sharing of the benefits of material and energy flows on one hand, and the social and environmental costs incurred at all stages of the commodity chain on the other.
The negative impacts are often absorbed by upstream communities, mainly involved in resource extraction, which are almost always rural, poor, and powerless. Byrne et al3 argue that the industrialised world consumes a disproportionate part of global resources via supply systems that extract energy from various parts of the world. The US alone consumes a quarter of the world’s energy, while its share of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is 22 per cent, and its share of the world population only 5 per cent. At the opposite end of the spectrum, less than one-fifth of global resources are dedicated to the needs of the South, home to two-thirds of the human community.
Of course, consumption at the individual level cannot be divorced from the wider project of economic growth and accumulation that governments have pursued so relentlessly, particularly over the past three decades of neoliberal ascendancy.4 Moreover, in the course of pursuing economic growth, some progress has been made in the efficient use of resources for each unit of economic activity.5 For example, energy intensity in both the UK and US is about 40 per cent lower than in 1980,6 as are material intensities more generally. A possible motive is that the ‘redesign’ of goods and services can help an economy to grow without depleting resources and surpassing ecological limits.
AllAfrica – All the Time