On Friday September 16th, Abe Goldman gave a Baraza presentation titled “Tropical Africa as Perpetrator & Victim of Global Climate Change: Africa and the Political Economy of Carbon.” Dr. Goldman is Associate Professor of Geography, and former Director of the Center for African Studies, at UF. The talk focused on Tropical Africa (i.e., sub-Saharan Africa with the exception of South Africa) as the world’s “low carbon champions” in both aggregate and per capita terms, and the implications of this status for the welfare and ability to cope with climate change of Africa’s people and societies.
Every developing country or region that has experienced rapid economic growth in the last half century and more has also dramatically increased its carbon (greenhouse gas) emissions. Tropical Africa’s emissions have increased at the lowest rate of any world region, and 99.5% of global emissions have been generated elsewhere. Tropical Africa’s status as a negligible perpetrator of global climate change has come at the cost of the lowest levels of electricity, powered transport, and overall development of any large world region, which are also directly related to its limited ability to cope with the effects of climate change and other extreme events without external assistance. Tropical Africa will also experience the largest population increase in human history over the next 40 years, adding about 1-billion people at the same time as climate is becoming far more volatile. Climate change may not affect Tropical Africa more than other regions in purely physical terms, but enhancing its limited ability to cope with those effects will require significant increases in its carbon emissions.