Urgent Climate Action Needed for Africa and the World

Africa has done little to cause the climate crisis, but the continent has suffered disproportionately from the effects of that crisis.

The injustice of the global climate crisis—in which North America and Europe have contributed well over half of all carbon dioxide emissions since the Industrial Revolution while Africa has contributed less than 5%—is front and center in a recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine co-signed by editors* from 17 African health and medicine journals.

Lukoye Atwoli, dean of Aga Khan University’s Medical College–East Africa and Center member, was a signatory and lead author of the article.

In an interconnected world, leaving countries to the mercy of environmental shocks creates instability that has severe consequences for all nations.
—Lukoye Atwoli and Team

With much attention now on this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference—referred to as the Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC, or simply COP27—there is no time like the present to take an unflinching look at ecosystem collapse, species extinction, and other real and present dangers to much of life on earth.

Immediate threats to Africa, the authors observe, include “flooding, drought, heat waves, reduced food production, and reduced labor productivity.” And they remind us that floods have altered disease vectors in ways that have increased health burdens from infectious disease across the continent, including diseases like malaria that already ravage African communities every year.

Food scarcity, low water quality, and a host of other issues contribute not only to poor health in general but more and more to mental health burdens as well, the authors note.

In addition to moral imperatives, the authors argue that addressing the climate crisis requires an all-hands-on-deck approach to approach all countries and regions of the globe, because the climate crisis exacerbates infectious disease and human migration in ways that rapidly impact entire nations across our globalized systems.

The authors ask that we use lessons learned from the Covid pandemic to move well beyond infectious disease mitigation to instead equip frontline countries first because they need the most support. “In an interconnected world, leaving countries to the mercy of environmental shocks creates instability that has severe consequences for all nations,” they argue.

The authors noted that, while climate summits often focus on reducing emissions to keep global temperatures in check, the harm of global warming in places like Africa is already severe.

Arguing pragmatically that “financing adaptation will be more cost-effective than relying on disaster relief,” the authors call for the provision of grants—not loans—to affected regions now to strike a balance between adaptation and mitigation, rather than remaining focused only on mitigation.

And they note Africa’s solidarity with other frontline regions of the world in demanding from wealthy nations that more be done immediately—even if only out of an interest in self-preservation—before the crises in Africa “spread and engulf all corners of the globe.”

If the leaders gathered at COP27 can finally deliver a just climate policy, it will indeed improve the global climate outlook—and the impacts of that crisis on human health—not only in Africa but in every human community around the world.

–Josh Messner

Notes

* Co-authors include editors from East African Medical Journal, West African Journal of Medicine, Sierra Leone Journal of Biomedical Research, Ethiopian Journal of Health Sciences, Annales Africaines de Médecine, Annals of African Surgery, African Journal of Primary Health Care & Family Medicine, Curationis, Ghana Medical Journal, African Journal of Reproductive Health, Eastern Mediterranean Health Journal, Mali Médical, Journal de la Faculté de Médecine d’Oran, African Health Sciences, Evidence-Based Nursing Research, East African Medical Journal, and La Tunisie Médicale. A full list of signatories is available online.