Media release from Pambazuka Press

Monday 28 November 2011

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Rachel Wiggans
Pambazuka Press
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THE CLIMATE TALKS - WILL ANYONE LISTEN?

As thousands assemble in Durban for this year’s climate talks, the countries of the global South hope for some listening as well as all the talking, says international climate campaigner, Nnimmo Bassey.

Bassey’s new book ‘To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa’ shows that the climate crisis confronting the world is mainly rooted in the wealthy economies’ exploitation and abuse of fossil fuels. Unless the connection is made between resource extraction, profiteering and climate change, the talks can not resolve the crises we all face.

Bassey is the director of Nigeria’s Environmental Rights Action, which he founded nearly 20 years ago. He has worked tirelessly to combat the enormous damage caused to Nigerian communities by the extraction of oil, and now works with other sub-Saharan countries blessed – or is it cursed? – with new oil finds.

It is the countries of the South that stand to lose most from catastrophic climate change; they have already suffered increases in floods, drought and famine, and the deserts are expanding. The signs are there to see in developed countries too, as ‘once-in-a century’ storms arrive more and more often and the seasons become less and less predictable. But in the climate talks last year in Cancun and the year before in Copenhagen, the developed countries dug in to defend their monstrous levels of energy consumption and their profiteering at the expense of everyone else.

Climate change that is already taking place will greatly compromise agricultural production in Africa. Bassey alerts us in his illuminating and sobering book to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s warning that, in some countries, yield from systems that are rain-fed may decline by as much as 50 per cent by 2020. He points out that climate change has the most direct impact on people whose lives are most closely intertwined with their environment, threatening their livelihoods, health and access to food.

Bassey’s work is rooted in the reality of what is happening now in Africa, and his knowledge and vision are increasingly recognised. In 2008 he was elected Chair of Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), the world’s largest grassroots environmental network. In 2009 he was named by TIME magazine as a Hero of the Environment. In 2010 he was a winner of the Right Livelihood Award (the Alternative Nobel Prize). In 2011, along with other climate campaigners from the South, he is in Durban.

The UN and government officials’ task is to make progress towards the UN goal of ‘preventing dangerous human interference with the climate system’. Will the powerful once again shout down the informed and articulate voices from the South? Or will they listen, this time, to the lived experience of climate change?
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Published by Pambazuka Press, ‘To Cook a Continent: Destructive Extraction and the Climate Crisis in Africa’ is available from www.pambazukapress.org and all good bookshops.