The Politics of

CLIMATE CHANGE

BY: SAKYI-GYINAE KWESI

 

“I believe we can act boldly, and decisively, in the face of a common threat. That’s why I come here today — not to talk, but to act.”^{1 Barack Obama} 

The Journey to COP 15

In early December 2009, the subject of climate change aggrandized as 192 world leaders converged at Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen to hew out of previous negotiations, an actionable deal to address climate change issues. COP 15, as it was captioned, was the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC was one of the three conventions adopted at the 1992 "Rio Earth Summit."....

A Mix of Fate with Faith

"How can man change the climate and make it stop raining: it is God's will that has brought the drought".⁶ This was a decrial captured by BBC’s Greg Whitehead from a female pastoralist from the arid lands of North-East Kenya against the proposition of world's scientists that climate change is man-made. Flippantly, her assertion sprung forth in the wake of prevalent deteriorating conditions resulting from climate change in Kenya. News reports...

Fiction or Fact

Despite the copious amounts of scientific reports being spewed out, the issue of climate change has graduated into something more than science; rather into politics and economics. Not everyone agrees to the facts unriddled by science. For some, the facts of climate change are symbolic of biased political ideologies and economical philosophies, thus dogmatically maintaining positions regardless of multitudinous evidence, and endlessly recycling views that have been repeatedly debunked by scientists.¹⁰...

Africa’s Position

The epic of climate change, like many other global issues, does not prove to be a favourite of Africa. In fact it has been asserted that Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change.¹⁶ Quoting a report by Up to Smoke 2, the BBC reported that on the average, the continent is 0.5C warmer than it was 100 years ago, but temperatures in some areas like a part of Kenya which has become 3.5C hotter in the past two decades, have risen much higher.¹⁷ The continent’s vulnerability coupled with a weak adaptive capacity is predicated on the existing developmental challenges such as endemic poverty, complex governance and...

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