Climate expert: Scandal that Africa gets so little research funding

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It’s grossly unfair and morally wrong that funding for climate change research on Africa is a very small proportion of global climate research funding, said globally-renowned climate change researcher Guy Midgley.

Midgley, the acting director at Stellenbosch University’s School for Climate Studies, was delivering a talk recently on “How to Avoid Climate Disaster: An African View,” tying in with Earth Day’s call to action to invest in the planet.

“Remember Africa produces 2% of emissions, we’re subject to the earliest and worst adverse impacts, but where is the funding going? Not into Africa. We are neglected, we’re forgotten, we have to figure it out for ourselves,” he said. 

“And indeed our proportion of GDP spent for funding on climate research … is far higher as a proportion of total research spent than the rest of the world because we’re not getting international support. We have to invest our own meagre resources in climate change research. This is unfair, it’s a scandal and just not acceptable.”

He said the African perspective is important because generally, African countries contribute very little to the causes of climate change but the continent is experiencing the most significant adverse effects. An African perspective is “one in which we’re part of a global community, which is following a pathway that is not supportive of a sustainable development trajectory for our countries”. 

South Africa and Nigeria are probably the only two countries contributing significantly to fossil fuel emissions, with South Africa being the biggest polluter. “And as we try to wrestle the control of our energy system out of the hands of the fossil fuel dinosaurs in this country, we are attempting to move into a more sustainable emissions trajectory … The decisions we make now will echo decades in the future, which is why it’s so important that we make the right decisions in South Africa [which] does to some extent lead the region.”

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s recent sixth assessment report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability, has a section on Africa that is the “best regional chapter of all the regions”, Midgley said. 

“What they’ve discovered, uncovered and synthesised is that we are already seeing climate impacts in Africa … And there’s a lot of blank spaces on the map simply because we don’t have data, so it’s very likely that there are impacts right across the continent and that is the evidence for why we say that Africa is the continent most likely to be adversely affected but also least able to adapt because of resource constraints and development constraints.”

The IPCC report found that between 1.5℃ and 2℃ of global warming, climate risks will pose significant challenges to Africa’s food security, economic growth, poverty eradication, biodiversity and human healtht.

The climate risks facing the continent are extremely worrying. “It’s in our interests that the world moves away from fossil fuels and emissions. We now know with reasonably good precision how much our continent has warmed and where,” said Midgley, noting that there are “some gaps” in Angola through to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Central Africa and central southern Africa. 

For rainfall the signals are difficult, he said. “Rainfall in Africa is unpredictable, it’s variable so it takes awhile to predict a trend but … in Madagascar there are some attributable drying trends on the southeast coast. But otherwise the trends are mixed.” 

“One of the main interests from the rest of the world is how can we use African lifestyles and African ecosystems to store carbon out of the atmosphere and get them to help us to reduce risks for us in the north or in the rich world? How can we encourage Africans to reduce their livestock emissions, how can we get them to change their agricultural practices, land use and land cover change?

“Can we persuade African countries to plant trillions of trees into their unique beautiful savanna and grassland ecosystems in order to store our carbon, thus condemning a generation or two of Africans to look after non-endemic Australian eucalypts as opposed to being able to graze their own livestock and benefit from the water supply from those incredible ecosystems?” 

He said hundreds of millions of dollars are being invested in these “influence campaigns” to encourage countries and landowners to plant new forests in these sorts of ecosystems. So Africa also faces the harmful responses of the rest of the world. 

He said the negotiators at international forums need to be aware of this. “Money talks, you know, you offer people a few thousands dollars … to plant a eucalyptus tree forest they may do it, and they sometimes do.” 

It is important to know that a lot of dangerous climate change can be avoided if the world keeps its warming below certain critical levels, said Midgley, noting that it’s very much in Africa’s interests to have the world invest in climate mitigation — efforts to reduce or prevent the emission of greenhouse gases.

The projections for biodiversity loss under 3℃ of global warming could be as much as 60% of Africa’s species. “We have a lot of rare endemic species spread throughout the continent and they’re very vulnerable to climate change because they’ve got small ranges and they’re not distributed over very large areas.”

These species, he said, are vulnerable to extinction and a changing climate “so our ecological and biological heritage is threatened by climate change”.

Africa’s development trajectories need to be arranged in line with climate change. “We’re one of the fastest urbanising continents on the planet, so people are moving out of rural areas into cities and potentially into much more vulnerable situations.

“The way that we develop into the future really needs to be informed by what climate change is doing … Ee could make this development sustainable or we could make it very unsustainable.”

The region plays a key role, because the Southern Ocean is important in absorbing carbon dioxide as are Africa’s ecosystems. “This region is approaching an era of potential sustainable development. We’ve got a really healthy population demographic and economic outlook given our governance constraints.”

Southern African science has made substantial contributions to global knowledge on climate change. 

“Our socio-ecological systems are at risk right throughout the region, not only of the impacts of climate change but what we would call … bad approaches to draw carbon dioxide out and international funders seem to have abandoned the region,” Midgley said, adding that he hoped funding would increase.

“We’re thus forced to invest our own meagre resources into maintaining our world-class contribution as evidenced by our amazing Africa chapter [in the IPCC report],” he said, explaining how “this debate is shot through with unfairness and inequity. “And we have a very strong case, for southern Africa particularly, to argue for much better international support.”