Luanda's Legacy: How Africa and Europe are Holding the Middle Ground in a Multipolar World

Dr Fatima Denton, Director of the United Nations University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa (UNU-INRA)

My experience and opportunities have been partly by design and partly by chance. I have a very eclectic background, principally from the humanities, having studied Latin and French literature. I went on to study political science, which led me into climate change at a time when there were few Africans in this space. It's a joy today to see how many people from the global South and from Africa are now present at COP, coming on board, becoming champions, experts and scholars, all speaking up. When I started 25 years ago, there were not many faces like mine. Today, we have a greater understanding of climate change, gender, poverty, and vulnerability than when I began.!

Career-wise, I joined an agency (APSO) that sends Irish nationals to different parts of the world. It was a very competitive process. I remember they asked me two questions – first, 'Are you Irish?' and second, 'Do you have two years?' I couldn't say yes to either. We also faced many questions, such as what you would do in an African village during a power cut, to test the candidates' survival skills and ability to think on their feet. I was brought up in the Gambia, but I was a bit of a townie, so I could not relate much to life in a rural setting. Luckily, they accepted me and I was sent off to Senegal, where I had studied earlier.

The work was with ENDA-Tiers Monde, which had a well-established energy programme. I was not an energy scholar to start with, but my time at the Sorbonne was useful. I could take any text and delve into it deeply, analytically. We needed to develop a narrative for Africa to exit the poverty trap, given the vast range of energy resources available. I was fortunate to have excellent mentors such as Youba Sokona.

The skills of a political scientist are needed everywhere. During my time at ENDA-TM, everyone was then talking about the Clean Development Mechanism, whether this could provide a sustainable dividend for Africa, and how Article 50 might fit within the overall convention. I was lucky to have landed at ENDA TM, where I learned a lot about mitigation aspects and energy access. But as an African, your daily engagement also helps you think a lot about climate adaptation. What you see across the streets and landscape has a bearing on adaptation; everywhere, people are coping with water or energy shortages. So I understood climate adaptation in both a broad, practical sense and a scholarly perspective.

I was keen to work on aspects of climate resilience, since I was among the first in the field to examine climate change and gender from a social vulnerability perspective. I did a lot of research for Energia, amongst others, and in 2002 published an article about women and climate change, highlighting this as a significant blind spot. This is roughly how I got started in the climate field. I might have gone back to the Gambia and settled into the Foreign Office, but ENDA sent me off on a very different tangent.

In all the organisations where I have worked, I have realised how vital knowledge is in winning people over, especially for a topic as complex as climate change and its implications. To challenge the debate around climate change, you must invest in research. Twenty years ago, there was a significant asymmetry in knowledge, with prolific knowledge production by Western scholars but very few Africans involved.

Why does the split between Mitigation and Adaptation dominate the climate field? The climate narrative became anchored in two main concepts, grounded in the power of knowledge generated from different sources. But they should be seen as complementary twin tasks.

In the case of UNECA, African member states respect the organisation for its expertise. While UNECA does very little direct research itself, it commissions, ensures the quality of, and publishes it. Member states know they can get an arsenal of sound information on subjects from reproductive rights to climate change. The statistics are well-founded and credible.

At Canada's IDRC, I led an extensive programme on adaptation research to support African institutions engaged in climate research, which hadn't received that level of support before. In climate change adaptation, unless you organise your evidence and adaptation facts into metrics that make sense to decision-makers, you will not be able to elicit technical and political support. My time at IDRC showed me and those we supported the risks of climate impacts, how you need to plan for adaptation, and how to get government officials on your side.

We often overlook how you turn knowledge into something useful for government and society. It took time for people to take adaptation questions on board. Let's take agricultural extension workers, for example. It became apparent that they need to understand the impacts of climate change to help build more resilient farming systems. Climate scenarios are not representations of some distant future but the conditions we're facing now. There are ways we can manage the risks, but we need the requisite support and ways to combine mitigation with adaptation.

The people around us needed to learn it from the perspective of soil degradation, crop choice and agricultural economics. There are many layers of knowledge and practice; we have to understand them better and their interconnections. We need to think about the language of adaptation and encourage policymakers to consider anticipatory adaptation, given Africa's vulnerability.

We have several projects where the Government of Ghana is central, such as our programme on understanding "green transitions". We start from the notion that if we are to transition to a low-carbon economy, we need the people most affected by transition dynamics to own the ideas and identify the opportunities. Let's take the huge and vital informal sector in Ghana and, more broadly, across Africa, which tends to get overlooked despite providing the majority of jobs. If enterprises in this sector understand green transitions and the stakes involved, they would be making a significant contribution to ecological and social justice. Examples include expanding the menu of energy options for women and entrepreneurs as they transition into the green economy.

We have focused on women because they are particularly affected by energy poverty; for example, in the agricultural sector, tools remain very rudimentary. So, our project, INFO-CAT, was about ways to incentivise entrepreneurs by saying, "You have ideas and innovation, let's buy into your most creative solutions." And we set up an award scheme for project ideas, testing them for functionality and creativity. We gave people a certain sum for start-up and scaling up to make clever solutions bigger and better.

It started here in Ghana, where we found at least 500 project ideas at the start. The project is still ongoing and has made its mark, though now it's reaching the tail end. It has generated significant media interest in devices tested for the benefit of women in agriculture, as the agri-energy nexus has often been ignored. Another project, JUSTIS, is trying to understand justice as it relates to the informal sector and to ways of reshaping the approach to Just Transition, drawing on its background in the US labour movement while taking an African perspective.

A Summit is always a good strategic venue for discussing collective problems like climate change. In my work with the Earth Commission, co-chaired by Johan Rockström, if we are looking at a pathway for green development, we cannot sweep justice under the carpet, because these issues will come back to bite us.

The justice elements of getting the transition right are also partly to blame for the disruptions in the current Earth systems. If you view justice as a tangible element, you can understand how the lack of justice destabilises the whole system. While the Luanda Summit offers a common space, there are power asymmetries we cannot deny. A collective effort is needed because if all 54 African countries tapped their fossil fuel resources, we would face an even greater climate emergency.

Let me offer a few suggestions. On climate change, invariably, people are well-intentioned and want to find ways to collaborate. But we are already at the 30th COP! Europe has to recognise that African countries are dealing with many systemic structural problems, such as debt, especially in the wake of the COVID pandemic. The cost of borrowing is very high in African countries, and access to capital is complicated.

Our continent accounts for only 4% of global emissions, so if we are to turn our economies around and make them climate-proof, we seek an act of solidarity from other parts of the world, especially those that have been responsible for most emissions. It is essential to understand that Africa is not coming to the table in the same way as others and faces significant challenges.

We are failing to build effective mechanisms for the climate actions we'd like to see. For example, climate finance to Africa is far short of what is required. With estimates of need totalling US$190bn a year by 2030, the finance received is less than a quarter of this. Debt remains a big problem.

Can we find hope in some of the changes underway, is disruption useful, or are these dangerous forces?

It's a very disruptive world at the moment, coming from multiple sources - economic, social, and technological. It has forced us to return to basics and emphasize solidarity and the need for transformative change. The US is an essential partner for Africa, but we can also foster closer relations with other partners. We are now looking at rethinking climate leadership. Globally, China is doing more than most countries to address climate change. This should be recognised. When we consider action on climate mitigation, the Climate Agreement has 192 signatory governments in total. Each one of those countries matters. We are truly in a multipolar world.

About Dr Fatima Denton

Dr Denton is the Director of the United Nations University Institute for Natural Resources in Africa (UNU-INRA), based in Ghana. She is an accomplished senior leader in the UN system, with depth of expertise in climate change and natural resource management, as well as in research and policy development, and in the African region. Before joining UNU-INRA, Dr. Denton worked with the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) in Ethiopia as Director of the Natural Resource Management Division and Coordinator of the African Climate Policy Centre. At the Canada-based International Development Research Centre (IDRC), she led the Adaptation to Climate Change in Africa programme.