Africa Taking Lead in Own Future
We spend a lot of time speaking about what we, as the ruling industrialized western nations, should be doing for the planet. And rightfully so. We have singlehandedly managed to send our planet into an environmental spin. With one hand we complain that China and India are putting out more and more in the way of harmful emissions while with the other hand we send them contracts to make everything from our clothes to our cutlery.
So it doesn’t come as a real surprise that we often end up forgetting the little people. Of course, whenever Africa is forced into the category of “little people,” there may just be a greater problem at hand.
Thankfully, despite the lack of attention that anyone in the world seems to be giving them, environmentally, Africa is taking matters into its own hands.
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From the big Kenya Airways down to a popular Nairobi radio station, Capital FM, businesses throughout Africa are doing what they can to go green. Capital FM, despite its almost negligible size, paid out $2,000 to a carbon offsetting company to become a carbon free company, in a bid to raise awareness.
“The environment is not being taken very seriously in most of the emerging markets, because we haven’t started feeling the pressure yet,” Adan Mohamed, chief executive of Barclays Bank Kenya, told Reuters. “But it has got to be addressed and it is up to us corporates to lead that.”
This is only one example of the mindset being passed around the businesses of Africa. With only 2.4% of the more than 1,100 projects for cutting greenhouse gases set up by the Clean Development Mechanism, a UN backed scheme, Africa is doing the tough yards almost on its own.
Last year, Yvo de Boer, the UN’s top climate official, told press that Africa was “the forgotten continent” in the battle against global warming, and was in desperate need of help. At first, we took this to mean that the country was being overlooked in terms of what the effects of global warming were doing to the country. Looking at the above figure, ‘the forgotten continent’ takes on a whole new meaning, but still leaves the blame entirely on our shoulders.
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credit: hdptcar at Flickr under a Creative Commons license
