The future of Africa and the world will be defined by our response to the ongoing climate crisis. In order to effectively confront this era-defining challenge, we need to rethink our development paradigm and move beyond the narrow industrial focus towards a future where the environment and social benefit are seen as intrinsically inseparable.

In December 2012 in Doha, Qatar, something significant shifted in the world of climate change politics: the collection of national governments under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the body responsible for global climate governance, officially admitted our collective failure to protect the climate and ushered in what is being referred to as the third era of climate change: 'loss and damage’. Thus, whether or not you are person concerned with climate change, you are officially a person living in an increasingly dangerous changing climate. The question facing us now, collectively, is not if we can stop climate change but, rather, how bad we will let it get? Just how we answer that question may well define our generation.

ACCEPTING FAILURE

In the space of my short lifetime, and probably yours too, we have seen the emergence of three so-called eras of climate change. The first era of climate change arose in the 1990s, when governments began to agree that as our industrial societies spewed more greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere we were potentially bringing upon ourselves dangerous runaway climate change, and that we needed therefore to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in order not to create a world defined by climatic chaos. Enter the era of mitigation.

About ten years later we realised that we (well, mostly the developed world and the global rich) weren’t yet doing enough to mitigate (i.e. to slow down emissions) and that our climate would begin to shift due to our actions and inactions, forcing us to adapt to changing climates, while mitigating to decrease the impact. Enter the second era of climate change: adaptation.

Alas, another ten years down the line the UN once again conceded failure, as we realised that both our mitigation and adaptation measures were insufficient, and that we are set to suffer significant losses as a result of human-caused climate change or global warming. So, on the back of humanity’s collective disappointment, we heralded in the third era of climate change: loss and damage.

As the findings of cutting edge climate science show, the impacts of our negative contributions are already being felt the world over in the form of more intense and more numerous droughts, floods, hurricanes and many other extreme weather events. This is coupled with slow-onset problems such as sea-level rise, desertification and salt-water intrusion. These events are definitive of a world changing through global warming and serve as a portent omen of worse, more intense and extreme events to come.

As unpleasant as this may sound, and as frustrating as it has been to watch year after year of missed opportunities for change, this is the reality that this generation faces, and future generations will inherit. However, we do have the ability to limit climate change’s negative effects but only if we act, only if we change, only if we critically revisit and redefine what it is that drives us, rethink the ideas that underpin our development paradigms, and revisit the goals that motivate us and influence our relationship both amongst ourselves and between us and our environment. Undeniably, this means a deep reflection, and within that reflection lies a world of possibilities both positive and negative.

By sitting through days and days of frustrating United Nations climate change conferences I have learnt that we cannot rely on global governance structures to save us and our climate – we have predominantly been doing so for over twenty years now, and look at where it has gotten us (Cf. 400 ppm). Realising the limitations of global governance, we need to take a more active role in tackling this problem ourselves in order to avoid looking back and blaming a faulty international governance system, when the true power for change lay within our own hands.

To repurpose a quote from Theodore Roszak, our complete world economy is not made up of the UN, but rather it 'is built upon millions [now billions] of small private acts of psychological surrender, the willingness of people to acquiesce in playing their assigned parts as cogs in the great [and in our case destructive] social machine’.

Yes, the challenge is ours as individuals, as citizens, as leaders, to create the world we want, or at least the best world we can given the cards we’ve been dealt.

For the complete article, please see Pambazuka News.