Pambazuka News is produced by a pan-African community of some 2,600 citizens and organisations - academics, policy makers, social activists, women's organisations, civil society organisations, writers, artists, poets, bloggers, and commentators who together produce insightful, sharp and thoughtful analyses and make it one of the largest and most innovative and influential web forums for social justice in Africa. 
climate change
From Bonn to Durban, climate meetings are conferences of polluters
Patrick Bond
2011-06-22, Issue 536
cc Foto43With a crucial conference on climate change taking place in Durban, South Africa, in December, Patrick Bond cuts through the elite conspiracy that will result in a no deal scenario and a continued rise in global temperatures. 'The strongest possible stance will be needed to finally address the mess,' he writes.
‘Climate capitalism’ won at Cancun – everyone else loses
Patrick Bond
2010-12-16, Issue 510
cc AkuppaPositive spin about the global climate summit in Cancun is based on reaching international consensus and establishing instruments to manage the crisis using market-based strategies – even though these are ‘failing everywhere they have been tried’. Looking ‘soberly at what was needed to reverse current warming and what was actually delivered, negotiators in Cancun ‘failed by any reasonable measure,’ Patrick Bond writes from Mexico.
Unpacking the hot air industry
Khadija Sharife
2010-12-16, Issue 510
cc S BThe first priority for developing countries when it comes to climate change mitigation should be reducing poverty, but the market-based approach of carbon trading is doing little to alleviate imbalances in the system, writes Khadija Sharife.
Key issues at the Cancun Climate Conference
Martin Khor
2010-12-02, Issue 508
cc I F DLow expectations about the outcomes of Cancun show how far climate change has fallen on the world's political agenda. ‘And that is bad indeed,’ writes Martin Khor, ‘because the climate problem has got even worse.’
Biosafety Protocol: Ten years on and lagging far behind
Mariam Mayet
2010-11-02, Issue 503
cc CIATFollowing a meeting in Japan between members of the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, Mariam Mayet says there ‘is a huge disconnect between the rather timid, insipid and potentially dated work of the Protocol and the huge biosafety challenges presented on the domestic level in many countries’.
Africa and the climate finance controversy
Patrick Bond
2010-10-14, Issue 500
cc MickyWill Africa end up paying for technologies that commodify life, or demand reparations for ecological damage done by the North, asks Patrick Bond.
Voices of resistance and hope from the World People’s Conference on Climate Change
Silvia Ribeiro
2010-10-07, Issue 499
cc K BSilvia Ribeiro summarises the outcomes of the World People's Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, held in Bolivia this past April. The Accord of the Peoples, the product of the meeting, highlights the destructive nature of industrial agriculture, agrofuels and new technologies such as transgenics, ‘terminator technologies’ and nanotechnology.
Voices from Madagascar
The first of a series of testimonials from the Antanosy people in southern Madagascar
The Antanosy people
2010-02-11, Issue 469
cc IRRIIn the coming weeks Pambazuka News will reproduce a series of oral testimonies given by the people of the Anosy region in southern Madagascar. Individuals describe the difficulties that they are experiencing due to climate change, mining and the rapid changes that come with it, food insecurity and no political voice.
In March 2009, Madagascar underwent a political coup in which Marc Ravolamanana’s government was unseated. Until the planned general elections in October 2010 Madagascar is being ‘managed’ by Haute Autorite de Transition (HAT). Since 2005, the mining of ilmenite has become the central drive of the Anosy region’s development strategy, a World Bank programme. This has led to rapid changes in the area on both the environment and the people. More than three-quarters of the population of Madagascar are reliant on agriculture to sustain their livelihoods. As a result, they are especially vulnerable to environmental shocks and the rapid development that has come with the mining. There are stories being told, but these have so far gone by unnoticed.
This week Pambazuka listens to Zababoatsy, a 58 year old, Antanosy man. ‘He feels strongly that the impact of mining activity on the environment has robbed him of any opportunity to “provide a better future for my family”.’ His account tells how mining in the area has had a profound, negative effect on the forest – the community’s ‘source of life’ – on the rivers and he tells how climate change is affecting food resources.**
On the Copenhagen climate change conference: Voices from Africa
Zahra Moloo
2010-01-07, Issue 464
cc mookEWhile world leaders and NGO delegates from around the world converged in Copenhagen for the 15th UN climate change conference, thousands of activists, writers, academics and artists gathered at Klimaforum, an alternative climate summit. Here people were given a space to meet, discuss and create radical solutions to climate change.
The following audio piece [mp3] features interviews with representatives of different countries across sub-Saharan Africa who were at Klimaforum. Wahu Kaara of the Kenya Debt Relief Network provides a critique of the UN climate change conference and addresses the significance of the Copenhagen mobilisation for movements in Kenya; Demba Moussa Dembélé, from the Jubilee South campaign in Senegal, talks about the need for sufficient funds to flow from the North to the South to compensate for ecological and climate debt; Julia Agwu from the University of Nigeria in Nsukka gives an analysis of gender and climate change and the impacts of climate change on women in Nigeria; and finally, Mabule Mokhine of the Greenhouse People's Environment Centre in Johannesburg explains the process by which land dispossession in South Africa was consolidated at the end of the apartheid and the need for collaborations between global grassroots movements.
System change not climate change
Ama Biney
2009-12-23, Issue 463
cc oxfam internationalA capitalist economic system dependent on fossil fuels and the exploitation of natural resources to generate profit has left people and ecosystems across large parts of the planet – including swathes of Africa – vulnerable to climate change, Ama Biney writes in this week’s Pambazuka News. The ‘derisory’ funding developed nations have offered to ‘assist developing countries to adapt to climate change’ is not enough to solve the problem, Biney argues. The real focus, says Biney, should be on ‘transforming the exploitative, unsustainable, profit-driven ethos that underpins the current system of wealth accumulation that simultaneously damages the environment’.
The mouse that roared in Copenhagen
Alemayehu G. Mariam
2009-12-22, Issue 463
cc BabbNetDespite earlier combative language involving 'walking out' of the Copenhagen climate conference, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's heading of the 'African delegation' in Copenhagen resulted in nothing more than mere 'servile on-looking', writes Alemayehu G. Mariam. Roundly criticised by representatives from organisations such as the G-77 and the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance, Zenawi's 'leadership' simply facilitated developed nations in discarding Africa's needs in the battle to tackle climate change, Mariam stresses.
What happened at the summit
Cuba's view of COP15
Fidel Castro
2009-12-23, Issue 463
cc Wikimedia Commons’Until very recently, the discussion revolved around the kind of society we would have. Today, the discussion centres on whether human society will survive.’ In this week’s Pambazuka News, Fidel Castro writes on the experiences of the Cuban delegation at last week’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen.
From Belém to Copenhagen: Challenging dominant governance paradigms
Salma Maoulidi
2009-12-17, Issue 462
cc oxfam internationalAs the United Nations Climate Change Conference approaches its final day, Salma Maoulidi writes in this week’s Pambazuka News of her elation at ‘the stance of African countries and other developing nations against a unilateral pollution emissions framework being imposed by rich, industrialised and polluting nations’. But, Maoulidi argues, unless key global governance structures are reformulated to make them relevant and accountable to global citizens, not just imperial and financial interests, the outcomes expected of international forums will remain elusive for Africa, no matter how well resourced and empowered the continent’s delegations.
Climate chaos: What prospects from Copenhagen?
Percy F. Makombe
2009-12-10, Issue 461
cc LrargerichAs delegates from 192 countries meet in Copenhagen to discuss a climate deal, Percy F. Makombe says the talks should be about implementing the Kyoto Protocol rather than negotiating a new agreement. But will developed countries commit to adequate reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions?
Climate change could increase conflict in Africa
Cyril Mychalejko
2009-12-04, Issue 460
cc C MontgomeryThe effects of climate change are likely to lead to increased levels of conflict across Africa, a new study has suggested. Cyril Mychalejko takes a closer look at responses to the report’s conclusions.
Climate change and Africa's natural resources
African governments and outside powers must be accountable
William Minter and Anita Wheeler
2009-10-29, Issue 455
cc TFTFOn the eve of the UN Climate Change Conference this December, ‘momentum for action falls far short of that needed to avert catastrophe’, William Minter and Anita Wheeler write in this week’s Pambazuka News. When it comes to Africa's natural resources, say Minter and Wheeler, the ‘prospects for change depend squarely on African governments, on foreign companies and their home-country governments, and on the pressures that can be mobilised by national and international civil society’. With Africa predicted to ‘suffer consequences out of all proportion to its contribution to global warming, which is primarily caused by greenhouse gas emissions from wealthy countries’, African governments ‘can and should take action now’.
African pastoralists face climate change threat
Aaron Tesfaye
2009-10-22, Issue 454
cc landcoalition.orgThe first victims of the change in global precipitation patterns will not be people from rich, polluting nations who engage in ruinous consumption, but the poorest of the poor – such as African pastoralists who exist ‘precariously at the periphery’, Aaron Tesfaye writes in Pambazuka News. As world leaders prepare for the UN Climate Change Conference in December, Tesfaye looks at why the summit’s agenda has ‘produced serious divisions between developed and developing nations’, with one side seeking to maintain a way of life, and the other struggling to meet basic needs.
Zenawi, save Lake Koka and then save Africa
Environmentalism at home and abroad
Alemayehu G. Mariam
2009-09-24, Issue 449
cc M FranklinBefore Meles Zenawi starts campaigning for reparations from the West for climate change, perhaps he ought to start closer to home by offering compensation to the families affected by industrial pollution in Ethiopia’s Lake Koka, writes Alemayehu G. Mariam in this week’s Pambazuka News.
A thief calling 'thief!': Meles Zenawi and climate change
Rezene Hagos
2009-09-24, Issue 449
cc TreestuffWhile Western countries' role is not to be underplayed, we should be extremely wary of the moral assertions of Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi around climate change, argues Rezene Hagos in this week's Pambazuka News. The Ethiopian government's record on both the environment and human rights is abysmal, writes Hagos, and Meles's demands for vast sums from donors in support of Africa's battle against climate change should be viewed with a great deal of scepticism.
AU Summit and G8 Review
Rotimi Sankore
2008-07-30, Issue 391
1. AU MEMBER STATES MUST STRENGTHEN CAPACITY OF THE AU COMMISSION AND ASSEMBLY OF HEADS OF STATES TO COPE SIMULTANEOUSLY WITH LONG-TERM DEVELOPMENT GOALS, AND ‘EMERGENCY’ ISSUES SUCH AS ZIMBABWE:...
Interrogating official mechanisms for tackling climate change
Nnimmo Bassey
2008-07-23, Issue 390
Climate Change is accepted today even by die hard sceptics as a real crisis that must be urgently tackled for the preservation of the earth in a form that would sustain human and other life forms. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the best known body of climate scientists who accepts that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations due to human activities
Friends of the Earth Africa on the food crisis
Friends of the Earth Africa
2008-07-16, Issue 390
Members of FoE Africa from Ghana, Togo, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Nigeria, Mauritius, Tunisia and Swaziland met for five days in Accra, Ghana reviewing issues that confront the African environment. A particular focus was placed on the current food crisis and agrofuels on the continent.