Once the cradle of humanity, the world’s poorest continent is being hit first and worst by climate change. Africa could again lead our way to a thriving, sustainable future, but not in the way most people think.
This article ‘follows the money’ described in a previous article, Africa’s Carbon Cash Tsunami – what could possibly go right?. Might Africa, so long a passive victim of global trends, now be an active catalyst in weaning Homo sapiens from our disastrous fossil fuel addiction?
Africa’s pivotal climate role
Our struggle to kick our fossil fuel habit drags on. Humans continue blundering on, leaving our children to deal with the climate we bequeath them.
Might the continent that produced our species play a critical role? And might it not be the passive role you’re thinking of?
Three key facts frame this analysis of Africa’s potential to lead us back to sustainability:
- People: Already nearly one in every five humans is African; the continent’s population is growing much faster than anywhere else in the world.
- Consumption: Africa emits less than 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, in line with its status as the poorest continent.
- Money: Tightening climate regulation means a tsunami of rich country carbon credit money will wash over Africa.
African countries are vying to get the lion’s share of this carbon cash tsunami. From north to south, African nations are hosting international conferences, passing laws and setting up infrastructure to make them the most attractive destination.
Uganda, for whom access to carbon money could be transformative, has passed its National Climate Change Regulations (2025). These new rules fill in the operational gaps left by the country’s Climate Change Act (2021).
Climate Change Commissioner at the Ministry of Water and Environment announced:
‘These regulations emphasize transparency and inclusivity. Everyone involved, especially local communities, must benefit fairly’.
The sustainability equation
Our efforts to restrain our greenhouse gas emissions have so far failed comprehensively.
After a brief Covid blip, emissions have resumed their hockey-stick upward trajectory. The need for a sustainable solution is more urgent than ever.
Politicians, professors and professionals do concoct ‘real-world’ panaceas to our climate emergency. Their equations feature three variables: People, Consumption and Money.
Note that:
- Factors like morality, responsibility, compassion or fairness are all lower-case considerations. Politicians treat them as statistically negligible in the ‘real world’, even one built on an imaginary thing, money.
- Current solutions are predicated on perpetual growth and constantly rising consumption. Solutions that involve consuming less are ‘politically unacceptable’. ‘Acceptable’ solutions (nuclear fusion, large scale carbon capture etc.) are magic pills that don’t yet exist. Call it the Ozempic approach to weight loss. Except Ozempic is 20 years away.
So far, our best solution to the sustainability equation has been carbon trading.
Theoretically, ‘offsetting’ harnesses market forces. It creates elegant incentives to nudge profit-driven corporations towards sustainability.
This mechanism is meant to adapt to variations in People and Consumption (additional Africans yet to be born, Chinese getting richer). But only if we spend as little Money as possible.
How’s this plan going?
The first carbon trade was in 1988, Since then, global emissions have risen 21% from 351 parts per million to 428 ppm.
Tick tock.
The enemy’s cunning plan
Remorselessly rising emissions prove the forces behind this failure remain in the ascendency.
We speak, of course, of Big Oil and its fellow short-term beneficiaries who prioritise profit over planet
Big Oil’s PR strategy uses Big Tobacco’s playbook. When denial runs out of road, switch to defending personal liberty. Shift the focus and responsibility onto individual behaviour, and away from government regulation.
This strategy’s funding and mechanisms are now well-documented. When secret, the deny/distract playbook worked brilliantly at frustrating effective climate action. Once exposed…it continued to work just fine.
Exposure has had negligible impact on the Three-Headed Beasts of Business, Government and Media, linked by power and money, maintaining Business As Usual.
Money plays a major part, but it’s not everything. Big Oil’s strategy is underpinned by clever behavioural psychology.
This relies heavily on divide-and-rule.
- Exploit culture wars to distract.
- Deploy random emotive issues, to justify inaction.
- Encourage anything that prevents governments from regulating them.
- When that fails, dilute or deflect any efforts at enforcement.
Big Oil is well aware that individual actions are, on their own, virtually futile. This is why they try so hard to shift the climate ‘debate’ in the direction of individual choice.
Amplified by social media, there are plenty of binary ding-dongs, from identity to status and fake news, for them to hijack.
Atmospheric physics, meanwhile, continues its course, indifferent to our Twitterspats and online petitions. Carbon don’t care.
For better or worse, carbon trading appears to be our only serious attempt to wean ourselves from our fossil fuel addiction.
The brightest glimmer
The brightest glimmer of hope so far in our response to the climate emergency has been the recent tightening of carbon reporting regulation.
You may not have noticed it, amid the headline-grabbing wars and ‘natural’ disasters. Also, these schemes have very boring names.
And don’t get too excited. The world’s biggest economy, America, is currently barging down the up escalator, trying to drag others down with it. Many, mainly oil producing countries like Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Brazil, are only too happy to join Trump II’s ‘Drill, baby, drill’ chorus.
But there are still some grown-ups in charge. The world’s biggest single market and the world’s biggest emitter have introduced emissions-cutting regulations with teeth:
- The EU’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD)
- China’s even wordier Work Plan for Improving the Carbon Emission Statistics and Accounting System
They may be unambitious, long-term and inadequate, as well as uncatchy. But these laws are also dragging businesses towards sustainability. They’re kicking and screaming, but they’re being firmly pushed away from their voluntary greenwash comfort zone, and onto the path of mandatory compliance.
You know these regulations have teeth, because of the degree of lobbying by corporations, before and after they passed into law.
Big business wouldn’t waste money on diluting, de-fanging and otherwise debilitating regulations if they were ineffective.
The malady and the treatment
Corporate kickback against regulation is as predictable as a knee being struck by a patella hammer.
Anything inhibiting profit or requiring change will produce the same knee-jerk reaction.
CEOs, like all of us, want to keep having ice-cream without having to eat any greens.
Their knee-jerk reaction (‘jobs will be lost’, ‘growth is threatened’) sound serious, but not as serious as doing nothing.
Business bosses complaining about anything that inhibits profit or requires change makes no difference to the actual problem.
Just as a knee-jerk reaction to a patella hammer is simply diagnostic of a condition, business mantra about their duty to ‘deliver shareholder value’ reveals the malady, not the cure.
The treatment, of course, is government regulation.
We all know it, deep down. Nanny insists you eat your greens before you get any ice-cream. The doctor tells you your diabetes will only get worse if you don’t change your diet. Your therapist calls out your excuses for your drug addiction.
Mandatory carbon reporting regulations may seem like a sticking-plaster treatment for the fossil fuel addiction that’s killing us.
But, so far, it’s the only game in town.
The African Patient
How will the African patient respond to the carbon trading treatment?
After all, sticking plasters sometimes work. Then there’s the placebo effect.
But should we be completely cynical about carbon trading’s chances of returning us to a path of sustainability? Consider the following:
- Like water flowing to its lowest point, the logic of carbon trading money requires money to flow from the Global North to the Global South.
- Another logical consequence of carbon offsetting is that the cheapest place to reduce a tonne of carbon is in the poorest country.
- Ergo, the lowest point where most of the money flows to is the poorest continent, hence the current situation described in Africa’s Carbon Cash Tsunami – what could possibly go right?.
Past flows of rich country money to Africa give us good reason to temper our expectations.
Slave trading, post-colonial ‘aid’ programmes, importing cheap African raw materials to add value at home…Africa has seldom benefitted from such transfers of wealth.
The legacy is usually negative. Billions recycled into Swiss bank accounts, offshore shell companies in Caribbean tax havens. Luxury property in New York, Paris and London. Meanwhile, in Africa, crippling debts inhibit the development of domestic economies.
Given this history, it seems naive to expect a different outcome just because the source of the money this time is carbon offsets.
Indeed, carbon trading’s own rich history of fraud since 1988 suggests it may present even fewer obstacles than usual to squandering this cash tsunami.
An African doctor’s prognosis
Project Drawdown published an article by Nigerian climate researcher Dr. Michael Diona.
In How can we finance a fair energy transition in Africa?, Dr. Diona concisely runs through various permutations to solve Africa’s People/Consumption/Money equation.
This doctor gives it to us straight. The article:
- Condemns Africa’s current financing paradigm as ‘neither adequate, accessible, nor appropriate’.
- Observes that globally, Africa receives just about 2% of total climate finance, much less than other regions.
- Most of this funding is in the form of loans, further burdening countries already facing debt distress.
- Many multilateral development banks and climate funds prioritize risk-averse, commercially viable projects, i.e. large-scale solar and wind farms in politically stable African countries. They ignore the urgent need to finance rural electrification and productive energy use projects in fragile African states.
Dr. Diona’s prescriptions too are clear and concise, but those happy with the status quo may not like the factors he cites as their foundations: ‘justice, partnership, and pragmatism’.
His three principles are:
- Development-centered decarbonization: Africa’s energy transition must be about powering growth, not just reducing emissions. Sustainable development is the best form of climate resilience.
- Equity in burden sharing: High-emitting countries must bear a larger share of the financing responsibility. This is not just about historical responsibility; it is also about capability. Africa should not be forced to choose between financing clean energy and its own development.
- Structural reform, not charity: Africa does not need pity or one-off pledges; it needs a seat at the table and access to fair finance. That means reforming the rules of the global financial system to unlock capital, reduce borrowing costs, and shifting more decision-making power to African institutions.
Like similar cases made by equally impressive, qualified and articulate Africa advocates over the centuries, Dr. Diona’s case is straightforward, logical and powerful.
His most powerful point, however, is in his concluding section on ‘Africa’s right to define its own path’.
The financing of Africa’s energy transition is not a test of Africa’s capacity; it is a test of global solidarity.
It’s the species, stupid
In 1977 Exxon scientists submitted a remarkably accurate report on the consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuel. Then, as now, we had the technology to grow sustainably.
If the Exxon board had decided to re-tool as an energy company, our climate crisis could have been averted. We’d all be using renewable energy, maybe from Exxon. In this alternative reality, that 1977 report would be a shining example of human ingenuity in the face of an imminent existential crisis. Its authors may be Nobel Laureates.
The ‘renewable energy transition’ would be an inspiring Wikipedia page. It would link to other examples of the human species choosing to act in common self-interest. Like when we pulled together to fix the ozone layer. Or when we cooperated to develop RNA vaccines to defeat Covid 19.
But that’s the fantasy version
Exxon suppressed the report, disbanded its science team, swore them to silence, and carried on business as usual.
At some point, which may be some way in the future, humanity will be forced to confront the physics of climate change.
The timing remains in our hands. We could collapse into a post-Apocalyptic Mad Max anarchy, but it’s not inevitable. Our billionaires could wave goodbye to our burning planet as their spaceships blast off to colonise Mars, but it’s not inevitable either.
The test, as Dr. Diona states, is one of global solidarity.
Can we treat our self-induced climate emergency as if it were the kind of exogenous threat favoured by Hollywood scriptwriters: genocidal aliens, robots, or asteroids? Is that what it would take for us to take collective action?
What will induce us to set aside our political, ideological, cultural, religious and class differences long enough to secure a long-term future for our children? Once we’ve returned to a sustainable equilibrium, our children can then enjoy the same freedom as us.
They may not thank us, and will no doubt create their own problems.
But they’ll at least know we won’t run out of oil.
We won’t burn, drown and shrivel because we continue to drill, baby, drill.
Prerequisite: good data
Carbon reduction, whether or not it’s part of an offsetting scheme, can only be taken seriously if it’s based on meaningful data.
AI might help, but not without high-quality, open source data to train itself. Government regulation is toothless unless the data reported by businesses is verifiable and auditable.
This requires carbon footprint data that’s:
- Accurate
- Comprehensive
- Universal
Calculated using a methodology that’s:
- Consistent
- Transparent
- Open-source
- Constantly updated with new and better data
For businesses, the carbon calculation service must:
- Be free to use
- Count all emissions, including Scope 3
- Be available to all of their supply chain
For regulators, the data collected and reported must be:
- Auditable
- Easy to access
- Verifiable
A global solution
See Through Carbon is all these things.
Devised and developed by a global network of carbon accounting, IT, AI, business, and marketing experts working pro bono, it’s currently running a series of Pilots.
Each of the 7 pilots road-tests a specific sector, locale, scope and methodology. Together, they will develop a universal portal that can be used at scale. See Through Carbon will:
- Be useful to multinationals, small businesses, farmers, health care, local governments, events large and small.
- Be accessible to anyone, anywhere in the world with a smartphone and internet connection.
- Be Free to use.
- Collect only carbon-related data.
- Make all data visible to anyone via a public database.
- Be a resource for governments, researchers, businesses, consultants for evidence-based carbon reduction.
AI tools can use it as a data training set to spot emission-cutting possibilities that escape human perception. Robots can be better at sifting through data to identify the most efficient and beneficial routes to sustainability.
In short, See Through Carbon is an accurate, free, open-source, transparent carbon reporting ecosystem.
It’s not fueled by money, but by global solidarity.
Out of Africa, Leading The World
Many global networks give lip service to hearing the voices of the Global South. See Through Carbon insists on it.
And not just on listening. Also embracing their participation.
- The See Through Carbon Competition launched the project in 2023 with a prize fund of US$500,000 worth of supercomputer-grade cloud computing. Applicants had to demonstrate they would use the prize to benefit the Global South. Global South applicants who would not otherwise be able to access this kind of cutting-edge, expensive resource were favoured.
- Two of the four winners were from Africa’s big sub-Saharan economies, Nigeria and South Africa.
- African carbon consultancies have been quick to embrace See Through Carbon. EALS Consult Uganda was the second business to sign a Memorandum of Understanding with See Through Carbon. Shortly after, JNCAVTC Ltd in Rwanda became the third.
- In Uganda, EALS IT team is now helping develop and code See Through Carbon’s Pilot database.
- EALS’ national network of outreach & education volunteers are adapting three See Through News outreach projects to deploy in Uganda to support the adoption of See Through Carbon.
- One, See Through News’ Global Reporter Intensive Training (GRIT) scheme, remotely trained 150 students at HIV orphanages in the Nairobi slum of Mathare in video storytelling. Two of their videos explaining their ideas to implement UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) locally in Mathare won prizes in a global competition.
- The See Through Network’s global team of experts include many world-leading AI experts. They are helping adapt the latest Large Language Model (LLM) breakthroughs to automate and scale See Through Carbon. The goal – to enable African family farms with access only to a smartphone to submit data in their native language using voice prompts.
Act now
If you’d like to take action to measurably reduce carbon, including joining the See Through Network, take your pick from these options.
None involve money. All are designed to create the shortest path to a sustainable future.
