By TIM HIRSCH
Emerging from Lagos airport into the smoggy morning heat, the drive across the lagoon to the island housing the smarter parts of the city brought home the vulnerability of this megacity to the impacts of climate change.
At the lagoon’s edge, whole neighbourhoods of rickety houses built on stilts and connected by perilous walkways stretch far out into the water.
It won’t take much sea level rise to make refugees out of these people.
Helping Nigerian journalists to make sense of the complex and bewildering world of climate change politics in the run-up to the UN Copenhagen conference was my brief for the two-day course at the British Council’s office in Lagos, sponsored by FCMB bank.
Facing this reality of life on the edge – quite literally – and persuading Nigerians that anything meaningful to them could be decided at Copenhagen was going to be a hard sell.
The lively bunch of journalists on my course had a healthy dollop of cynicism about the whole UN process. This didn’t improve when I explained that the major source of carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) in Nigeria is from projects to prevent the widespread practice of gas-flaring in the oilfields – a practice that blights local communities as well as creating about a third of the country’s carbon dioxide emissions.
Gas-flaring has also been declared illegal by Nigeria’s courts – but, for most companies, the cheapest option is just to pay the fines and carry on flaring.
One of my students looked at me incredulously: “So let me get this straight.
The UN is allowing these companies to earn money for not doing something that is illegal?” I nodded. “So are we going to start paying cocaine dealers for not dealing?” There was no answer to that one.
Having spent much of the last 12 years reporting on the post-Kyoto climate process, explaining it to an audience in Africa brings home just how marginalised this continent has been – and how sceptical its journalists are entitled to be.
For example, of more than 1900 projects approved under the CDM to bring investment in emission-abating technologies to the developing world, just 36 are in Africa. China, India, Brazil and Mexico have the lion’s share.
“Why don’t we have more? Don’t they trust us?” Again, no answer.
Despite the scepticism, there was a burning curiosity on the part of these journalists to understand better what the arguments at Copenhagen are about, because the process has almost zero visibility in the Nigerian media.
If the climate negotiators really want to engage Africa in this process, they have a long way to go.
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