Africa Is At Greater Risk Of Climate Change Than The Rest Of The World - Ambassador Solon

Pablo Solon was the ambassador of the Plurinational State of Bolivia to the United Nations from February 2009 to July 2011 and is the current Executive Director of the NGO, Focus on the Global South. Solon visited  Nigeria recently  as Chief Instigator of the inaugural Sustainability Academy (‘Home School’) organized by the Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF). In this interview with Betty Abah conducted at the University of Lagos venue of the programme, he spoke on the global climate change crises and peculiar implications for Africa, the Niger Delta among other burning issues. EXCERPTS:

Why are you focusing on Global South and not on global north? Are there issues that are peculiar or urgent about the global south that you want to draw the audience of the world to?

They are many (issues(. We are focusing on the Global South on the issues of climate as you have seen. The issues that have to do with water, land, agriculture agro-ecology, forest, and also, the issues that have to do with trade and investment; free trade agreement, investment agreement, World Trade Organization, Free Trade Agreement, Bilateral Investment Treaties. So, these are the three; Climate change, trade and investment.

Speaking specifically about Climate Change. Does it not affect the Global north as well?

If so, why are you not advocating on behalf of the Global North also?

It will also affect them, of course, and I also went to the US, and it’s obvious that climate change is going to impact everybody. The difference is that, if you have an income per year, of $40, 000, you are going to be in a better situation to address the issue of climate change than a person that has only an income of $1, 000 per year. And that is in the Global South. Granted, the climate change is going to affect everybody, yet it is not going to affect them exactly the same way, and or not everybody is going to have the same possibilities if he is from the Global South or if he is from the rich Global North but is poor.

Okay, we in Africa, do you think we should be worried about the future of the immediate impact of the climate change, and how much worried should we really be?

Very worried! (emphatically) If you read all the scientific reports, the governmental panel on the climate change of the United Nations, the climate change that is happening will really have more bad impacts on Africa. So, as I explained today, you will have an increase in temperature in Africa that will only be more than what it is going to be in any other parts of the continents. So, this means less water, less land for food production, and that means they are going to have more diseases and that could lead to more conflicts in Africa.

What are the other issues you think are peculiar to Africa in terms of climate change?

What everybody says is that Africa is the continent where there is no poverty. So, as I was saying, if you have an income of $40, 000, you are in a better condition. Africa is a continent where you have the lowest income per capital. So, of course, it would be more affected by the impact due to less capacity to respond, and due to less resource. And many resources that Africa has, Africa is losing them because of very bad policies from government.

And, do you thing that African leaders negotiating at the international level are doing fairly enough to protect the continent?

My experience with African leaders here is that they begin those negotiations and they are very weak, almost accepting everything in the negotiations of the UN. So, I see that, even when they are at the conference of the UN on Climate Change in South Africa, the voices of Africa was loud at the beginning  but there, they later capitulated… That is really very bad because it has created a new regime that is based on the pledges and not on commitment that is based on what you voluntarily want to do and not to commit more of what is binding for you to do.

Earlier at the meeting, you spoke also about false solutions, so, what that means is that on one hand, we don’t have much hope in our leaders to represent us well, and on the other hand, the international communities and the World Bank for example, are proffering false solutions.. Could you please elaborate more about false solutions for the interest of the people who were not at the Academy?

To understanding false solution, what is the real solution? The real solution is to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels, it is to leave under the ground two third of the world deposit of fossil fuel. That is the real solution. Now, the cooperation that wants to make money out of the fossil fuels, instead of saying, ‘okay, we are going to leave under the ground’, which means they accept to lose a lot of money, a lot of profit they are going to make with their money…they (now) say they are going to solve this through technology and through marketing technologies like geo-engineering. That is projects at the scale of the planet A…That will really change the system… And also, other initiatives like genetically modified organisms, or synthetic biology. So, those are the technologies that they are promoting, saying ‘we can keep polluting the world because through this technology, we are going to solve it’. And that is really a false solution. It could create more damage to the world. On the other hand, we have the other solution, that is; now, we are going to solve this problem through the capital market. Capital markets like production of emission from deforestation and degradation of forest, now they have the idea of climates… So, all of these composures tend to create a capital market so that investors can put their capitals and have profits. But, in reality, they are not going to reduce the greenhouse gasses…That is not going to happen as we have seen in the experience of the European Union here in the past five years. So, instead of going through these false solutions, we have to address the real cause that is fossil fuel.

In the case of Nigeria, there is one thing that is so dramatic; that is gas flaring because, gas flaring, you are burning gas not for energy but you are burning it because you only want to export the oil, and that is creating a lot of poisonous gases.  It damages the health of the communities that are in the surroundings, and it means a big loss for the country, of around $2.5 billion. If that gas will be treated, it can be used to produce energy. It’s really something that I cannot understand why in Nigeria, you don’t have 24 hours energy (electricity), having so much gas. I think that Nigeria is a classical example of the fact that it is not true that fossil fuels need to be exploited for the benefit of humanity. Nigeria shows that fossil fuels are, most of the time, exploited for the benefit of very few transnational corporations and some rich politicians, and not really for the benefits of humanity.

Exactly, That also bring us to the issue of the Niger Delta and related issues. Besides the ironies around the fossil fuels, resource-fueled conflict is another headache in the Niger Delta. Is this reality peculiar to Nigeria, or is it what happens all over the world where you have national deposits like fossil oil?

It is all over the world. For example, in India, there are huge conflicts sometimes of hundreds of thousands persons mobilizing because they don’t want an extractive industry or they don’t want a damn that will destroy their land. You have that in Asia and in Latin America. We are living in a world where the capitalist system is exploiting more and more of the remaining natural resources at a scale we never have seen before now. There have never been so many extractive industries as we have them now. And in the entire world, communities that live around those extractive industries are reacting. They are saying, “We are tired of   this permanent abuse, we don’t want this anymore”. And you have them all over the world. 

Besides conflicts related to extractive industry, beside environmental pollution, the human right abuse, there is also the issue of the fact that fossil fuel is a non-renewable energy source, (just like Nnimmo Bassey said earlier in the Academy that ‘just as the end of the stone age did not signify the end of stones and that one day, fossil fuel will become irrelevant), what future do you foresee for the Niger-Delta in the post -fossil fuel era?

I think it is a big lie for anyone to think that the future relies on oil and that you are going to come out of poverty because you have some oil .But I think the future of Nigeria will be better of if you don’t have any more oil. You will have cleaner lands and you will begin to rely more on local production and begin diversifying your industrial productions, diversifying your food productions. The problem is that, what is called the ‘Curse of the Dutch’ is that because you have oil, that is the easiest way to get money and you forget that other factors of the economy are key, like industrialization, like food production and so on. So, there is energy. There is energy from the sun, from the wind, in the ocean, in the rivers, in the waters, and we can use those energies. And why we don’t use them is because there is (the) interest to use the fossil fuel, because if you don’t use them it means that many populations that have invested money are going to lose that money and are not going to make the profit they want to make.

So, exactly what future do you foresee when fossil oil is no longer available or relevant?

Before that, we are going to change to these other kinds of energies for sure. But we need to do it not when it is not available. We need to stop using it, even if it’s available, because if we use it, we are going to provoke the greatest catastrophe in human history. If we burn all the fossil fuels, the temperature will go to 18 degree Celsius and increase in 18 degree Celsius, and that is catastrophe. We are not going to be speaking about global warming; we are going to be speaking about global burnings!

You just mention alternative sources of energy as alternatives to fossil fuel, but there has also been controversies surrounding the alternative sources of energy, like we had cases that, in trying to use other sources of energy, apart from fossil fuels, corporations also are taking up lands, planting seeds  that are not exactly friendly to the environment and diverting food resources to fueling machines. Isn’t it all complicating?

Yes, we have a problem with genetically modified organisms and foods. There is the problem of bio-fuel. You can always have problems, even with solar energy, because, if you put solar panels, it depends on where you put them…. So there is no magic solution that you can say, ‘oh, we will apply this and everything will be solved like with the magic world’. A magic world doesn’t exist. Any solution, whether gas, hydro power is a solution, but it depends on what is going to be the scale, how big is going to be the damn, because if it is too big, it can create a problem, that is even bigger… But if you use this in a planned way, taking into account how to re-establish more the balance of the whole system and provide a cheaper service, a cheaper energy to the people, then it will be possible to get out the  fossil fuels.

And to take you back a little backwards, would you want to speak specifically on the World Bank and the programmes or actions on climate change? Are they honest?

World Bank has very good studies on the impacts of climate change, but the solutions that they are promoting are false solutions, because they don’t say, ‘hey!, in the first place, who has to pay the ecological debt, the climate debt, Is it the US, Europe or Japan?’ They will never say that. They will never speak that there is a climate there. Second, they will not say that the main responsibility is to take the first step and do it very hard. No! They will not criticize that the US is doing a reduction of only three per cent of the greenhouse gases by the year 2020 when already everybody says that, that should have happened by five percent by the year 2012. The World Bank will turn out false technologies in agriculture and the World Bank will boom up the capital market. So, what I’m seeing is that World Bank is not very interested in climate, but what they want to promote is false solutions that are going to address more of the interest of the investment, the capital, and not the interest of the people.

And what is the role of the UN in all of these?

The UN has been captured by big corporations. So, in reality, the UN is powerless.

Thanks for your time.

You are welcome!