The Climate Change Summit, COP27, is well underway in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, lasting from 6-18 November 2022. I was quite pleased that on Monday and Tuesday this week, the leaders of the United Nations, Pakistan, Kenya, and Norway, among all the other countries, held meetings on key issues. Pakistan currently holds the chair of the Group of 77, established in 1964, today comprising 134 member countries.
I lived in Kenya before I made Pakistan my homeland, and Kenya is one of Africa’s most dynamic countries, and it now has a newly elected president, HE William Ruto, who has to handle many difficulties. Currently, recurrent drought affects large areas of the north and west of Kenya, neighbouring Somalia, Ethiopia, and other countries in the region. Half of the close to one million pastoralist population in Kenya’s semi-arid Turkana County faces starvation.
Pakistan’s PM Shehbaz Sharif met the Norwegian PM Jonas Gahr Støre. Close cooperation between those countries is certainly important; Norway is one of the 30 richest countries in the world, with a population of just about five and a half million, and its economy is bigger than that of Pakistan. Also, there is closeness because of the large Pakistani community in Norway, with several doing well in politics and other sectors of society.
Norway will continue giving special assistance to Pakistan after this year’s devastating floods when up to a third of the country was flooded, resulting in many deaths, destruction of infrastructure and harvests, displacement of people, and more. This week, the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres discussed with Pakistan’s PM Shehbaz Sharif, Norway’s PM Jonas Gahr Støre, and other leaders, how Pakistan can be assisted and how a new international system can be established to help poor countries suffering from poverty and climate change. It is now noted that many difficulties are caused by the rich countries, which historically have become rich through overusing nature, negatively affecting all countries. Also, the former colonies were exploited and hindered in their development by the rich countries.
The time has come to establish new structures that can correct the existing ‘loss and damage’—structures between rich and poor countries, with a special focus on climate change. Pakistan is one of the countries likely to be most negatively affected by climate change. The term ‘loss and damage’ are being used at this year’s COP27 summit. It underlines that it is a question of ‘justice and fairness’, not only talk and kind words, which have often been common till now in development aid and other North-South relations.
This year’s COP27 draws attention to change in the outdated international multilateral system, in particular, that of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, but also the whole United Nations system. It seems the West is beginning to realize that the system is failing to contribute ‘justice and fairness’ in the world and that climate change is impossible unless all countries work together.
The UN Secretary-General was particularly clear and crisp in his COP27 opening speech, saying that the planet is fast approaching tipping points that can make ‘climate chaos’ irreversible. He said that “we are on a highway to climate hell with the foot on the accelerator”.
The former American Vice President from 1993-2001, Al Gore, referred to teaching in the three Abrahamic religions, that God has set before humanity a choice between blessings and curses, between life and death. “We face that choice; today, we can continue the culture of death that surrounds our addiction to fossil fuels (...).” And then he drew attention to the current floods in Pakistan. Al Gore, an acknowledged expert on climate change and environmental issues drew attention to the urgency and importance of addressing climate change issues, with concrete measures to reverse developments and reach results.
In hindsight, I wondered if the world would have been different if he had been declared winner of the particularly tight Presidential Elections in the USA in 2000, when the Supreme Court decided, with 5-4 votes, that George W. Bush was the winner, and Al Gore let go of the month-long legal battles about the results. We should be reminded that the USA, China, and the West in general, have been, and still are, major obstacles to reaching less pollution and a cleaner world as fast as ‘everyone’ says they want, also the mentioned countries.
The Russian war in Ukraine is devastating. It will cast an unknown, lasting dark shadow on life in Europe and the entire world, and relations between countries and continents. Climate change issues are paramount as they influence the future of the world forever.
There is hope in the establishment of a new, lasting, and binding Global Fund – if it indeed happens – to benefit the poor countries in the world, to more effectively pay back for ‘loss and damage’, and create some more ‘justice and fairness’ in the world, as regards climate change and overall development issues. We are now close to 8 billion people in the world, with about ten percent living in extreme poverty and twenty percent below the poverty line. Development aid and emergency aid cushion little. The current disaster in Pakistan is about climate change, but it is also a humanitarian, social, and economic catastrophe, being a consequence of the sins of all of us, indeed the leaders, who have failed in being good custodians and stewards of nature – as our religions, too, teach us to be.
Pakistan’s Minister of Climate Change, Sherry Rehman, has drawn attention to this, being a particularly competent woman in the post. The assistance that is received from the international community is little when sudden and slow emergencies happen, and when it is up to the donors’ whims, will, and ability to help. Funds are never enough, as the WFP, UNHCR, and the UN, in general, keep experiencing. Hence, there is a need for establishing a new and binding international system, entirely different from the current Western-led multilateral system, always keeping the long end of the stick, ensuring the interests of the rich countries, even when the rich countries’ long-term interests aren’t served, as is now evident regarding climate change and other environmental issues.
On top of it, the propaganda of the West is to pretend that they want all good things done for us all, indeed the poor and needy, and developing countries are often blamed for shortcomings in implementation – either it is about girls’ education in Afghanistan, economic corruption, lack of justice, failed health services, food insecurity, and more – while such maladies are part of history and the current international order, and only some of it can be corrected by the poor countries themselves.
We know that it is difficult to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps. Or, as President Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere, the legendary first PM and president of Tanganyika from 1961-1964, and then president of Tanzania, from 1964-1985, said: we petty and feel sorry for the poor many who carry us on his or her shoulders, but we do not do the only right thing that can relieve the struggle and pain, climb down from the shoulders of the one we sit on.