African wants more urgency
“Africa is dying while we are busy discussing the numbers,” African Group representative Victor Fodeke has said.
By Daniel Nielsen
Fodeke, who is Nigeria’s chief climate officer, was urging developed countries to get on with the negotiations and stop obsessing over numbers and targets.
He used the metaphor of a two-storey house in a flood to illustrate the difference between the developing and developed world in the context of climate change. The developing world lives downstairs and tells the developed world upstairs that the house is flooding. The developed world asks the developing to wait while the problem is discussed.
“Africa doesn’t have the technological resources, the finance or the capacity to cope with the consequences of climate change,” Fodeke said.
“We have only one climate, one Earth and one people,” he continued.
African Group’s chairman Kamel Djemouai, from Algeria, said following the commitments made under the Kyoto Protocol was imperative to the success of any Copenhagen agreement.
“If we don’t follow those [Kyoto Protocol] numbers and the scale of their commitments, we cannot have any quantifiable agreement.”
In relation to the two degree temperature rise target put forward mostly by developed nations, Djemouai said: “Two degrees all over the world is 3 degrees in Africa.”
