Ought of Africa: A Report From the U.N. Climate Conference
Gary Braasch reports from the latest U.N. climate-change convention in Nairobi, Kenya. Braasch has been photographing and reporting on climate change since 1999. His forthcoming book, Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming Is Changing the World, will be published by the University of California Press next year.
The seasonal rains have returned to southern Kenya, greening the countryside once again. But in the north and east, near the Somalian border, refugee camps set up for those who lost everything in a deep drought earlier this year are suddenly being flooded out by this season’s unusually severe rains. Many see this rapid switch from drought to deluge as global warming in action — more searing droughts and stronger rainstorms in an intensifying cycle that affects the world’s very poorest.
Not far away, in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, officials and observers from around the world gathered for this year’s United Nations summit on climate change. Here, the severity and urgency of global warming should have seemed clearer to delegates than it did at last year’s frigid Montreal summit.
No continent is as vulnerable to climate disruption as Africa, and none harbors more poverty. That’s why it’s been a big deal to African nations that the 12th Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change was held for the first time in sub-Saharan Africa. Many African nations sent large delegations. African luminaries like Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan shed light on the plight of Africans in the face of global climate change. Environmental groups presented papers on threats to the continent. (more…)
