One does not have to pay close attention to the debates, declarations and demonstrations echoing from the first Africa Climate Summit, or to the unmistakable reporting in African news media to grasp the devastation that climate change is wreaking across the continent. According to the World Meteorological Organization (2023), more than 110 million people in Africa were directly affected by weather, climate, and water-related hazards in 2022. Since the beginning of 2023, the continent has experienced five major weather disasters. In Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia, consecutive failed rainy seasons from 2020 to 2022 pushed the Horn of Africa to the brink of famine and displaced millions before long-awaited rains flooded homes and farmland across the region during extreme weather events in March 2023. In Algeria, 97 wildfires were recorded across 16 provinces during July and August, affecting forests, crops and farmland. West and Central Africa experienced one of the worst flooding disasters on record, killing thousands and displacing millions across 20 countries, before tropical cyclone Freddy ripped through Malawi, Mozambique and Madagascar in early 2023. The summer months brought a stifling heatwave, with scorching temperatures posing severe health risks throughout much of the continent. The impacts of intensifying heat, droughts and floods underscore that humanity is falling behind in its race against global climate change – and nowhere are the shattering effects on livelihoods and wellbeing more apparent, realised and experienced than in Africa. While the continent has contributed negligibly to the changing climate – it is responsible for less than five per cent of global carbon emissions – it stands out disproportionately as the most vulnerable region in the world. As Kola Ibrahim pointedly puts it in his new book, ‘Africa’s place in the global climate change scenario is contradictory and abysmal’ (100). Probing the global paradox of unprecedented capitalist wealth coexisting alongside environmental devastation and mass poverty, Climate imperialism in Africa: critical commentary on the political economy of global climate change regime distinctly contributes to the search for explanations and begins to sketch out practical alternatives.
Ibrahim begins this perceptive contribution by tracing history and connecting the dots to expose the existing inequities and imperialist capitalist relations of the African climate crisis. The political, economic, and socio-cultural history that brought Africa to this quandary began with colonialism – the systemic domination and plundering from the continent its natural and human resources – and worsened through post-colonial extractive activities, ably supported by neo-colonial local ruling classes who emerged as compradors in the global capitalist system. According to Ibrahim, the current climate crisis is a fallout and continuation of the plundering of the continent by global finance capital, reinforced by a retrogressive ruling class, complicit politicians, and emergent big business (76). Climate finance is described as a greenwashing programme initiated by the advanced and industrialised countries of the world and implemented through multinational institutions to offset the costs of climate adaptation and mitigation in Africa. In truth, however, these lending schemes deflect from capitalist investments in polluting and extractive industries and give false hope of socio-economic improvement in the form of the hypnotising elixir named development (121). As with other neoliberal development measures, these climate finance plans come with conditionalities – prompting governmental compliance and public consent, and fashioning recipient countries in the image desired by elite donor nations. Rather than supporting advance warning, mitigation and adaptation through scientific, technological and economic capacities, neoliberal global climate politics has become an avenue to turn Africa into a green market and source of raw materials for the global production of climate products, as well as a region of continued fossil fuel extraction. The market-driven solutions of the green economy discussed and proposed at diplomatic summits and by multilateral institutions, development agencies and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are pushing Africa’s economy and society further under the dictates of global finance capital. Loans and investments for energy transition and climate adaptation are deepening debts and advancing dependence; meanwhile, Africa’s acquisition of necessary technologies remains insignificant, and local knowledge and inputs continue to be disregarded.
The book offers a detailed summary of the various solutions being proposed through the global market arrangement, highlighting their piecemeal limitations and shortfalls in considering necessary systematic reformulations. For instance, carbon market approaches – including emissions trading systems and carbon taxes – are proven insignificant in the face of rising emissions, addressing only one aspect of environmental degradation, ignoring sustained impacts, and leaving unaddressed larger issues of poverty and underdevelopment (42–47). Net-zero emission standards are shown to be unable to effectively reduce emissions, stabilise sequestration or increase the carbon capture and storage needed for decarbonisation. Nature-based solutions are exposed as contradictory and lacking a holistic agenda, allowing them to be used as alibis for fossil fuel and large-scale industrial projects (49–53). Green growth and decoupling efforts aimed at incorporating green policies and programmes into the capitalist economic model are shown to be as unimaginative and impracticable as other explored solutions – each requiring unrealistic emissions reductions in profit-making endeavours, international compromise, and yet-to-be-realised accountability measures that leave room for political and diplomatic manoeuvring and the continued profitability of corporate exploitation and environmental destruction (54–56).
Ibrahim makes a significant contribution to this area of study through a critical engagement with proposed radical alternatives to market-orientated climate solutions and the different colorations and definitions of climate justice. The author succinctly summarises current proposed alternatives that ‘tend to promote justice and place the burden of emission control and climate impacts on big polluting countries and corporations’ (57). For instance, international NGOs, students and some company employees are putting pressure on governments, universities and private institutions to divest from fossil fuel stocks, bonds and other assets; however, these – often marginal – divestments only contribute to a veneer of legitimacy and benevolence. Token divestments do little to thwart expanding extractive operations and stifle the demands for material justice from allies of those communities on the frontline of damaging, polluting activities (58–59). Advocates of degrowth propose plans for the reduction of continuous growth – especially in advanced economies – on the grounds that it is unsustainable and a threat to the natural ecosystem. As Ibrahim correctly points out, however, proponents have not sufficiently addressed the continued need for extractive metals in renewable energy production or the predictable struggle that will result from geopolitical realignment. Critical of neo-Marxist support of degrowth, Ibrahim argues that while it is correct to note that the capitalist system breeds socially unnecessary and harmful production, it is ‘wrong to conclude that production expansion is automatically bad’, in that such a conclusion misidentifies the problem of capitalist ownership over the means of production needed in processes to mitigate and adjust to the climate crisis (64). Notwithstanding the limitations of degrowth theory, the author suggests that it has its merits in criticisms of neoliberalism and capitalist growth, as well as its policy proposals for poverty reduction initiatives and public investments needed to make serious progress in reaching net-zero emissions.
Advancing his explanation of how Africa arrived at the current moment of climate crisis, the author turns to his two essential contributions: critically engaging with the different camps and discernible fissures of ecosocialism; and transcending its elite idealism, which limits a more organic and inclusive collective consciousness and progressive movement that can make revolutionary demands on the capitalist class and forge a comprehensive socialist alternative for climate change resilience and reduction. The common thread through the different trends of ecosocialism is ‘the understanding that capitalism is incapable of solving the ecological crisis and catastrophe, because the profit-orientation of capitalism [itself] created the ecological crisis’ (68). The first of these trends aims to incorporate socialist programmes into green programmes, which historically have been central to liberal reforms planned and demanded through democratic participation and aligned with green capitalism. The other trend highlights the traditional tenets of socialism: public ownership of the mainstay of the economy, democratising resource ownership, and seizing political power from an elite minority. For Ibrahim, current strands of ecosocialism are inert in their plans for achieving an ecosocialist world: through social revolution, bourgeois politics, or compromise and alliance with portions of the bourgeois class. This deficiency is addressed and political programme solutions are proposed by the author later in the book. A second weakness of current trends, notes the author, is the ‘failure to explicitly emphasise the role of the working class in achieving the programmes and politics of ecosocialism’ (69). The author appropriately places the significance and power of the working class at the centre of a socialist climate justice agenda, emphasising that because workers are central to the operations of capitalism, their class intervention through climate and ecological programmes and popular actions will have enormous impacts on climate debates and governance in Africa. Compellingly, Ibrahim argues that climate justice programmes will be weak and unsustainable without a clear understanding of the role of the working class in fossil fuel value chains, movement-building, and developing ecosocialist alternatives. This assessment is not only accurate in the context of Africa but is applicable to climate justice campaigns around the globe. The result of such misunderstanding and dismissiveness towards the working class leaves ecosocialist programmes vulnerable to dissolution into anarchist or bourgeois politics – outcomes that have been witnessed by those in climate justice movements in every corner of the world.
Through extensive engagement with secondary climate and social science sources, as well as multilateral and government agency reports, Ibrahim – the self-described scholar-activist and public intellectual – arrives at his proposal for a new climate justice movement for Africa. Ibrahim argues that the ultimate solution lies in transforming the current global climate agenda to a socialist system – not in the unforeseeable future but rapidly, by mobilising the social forces required for the demand for and execution of that change. The author sees the immediate aim and first step to achieving this outcome as joining forces across the working class and other oppressed strata, including the intelligentsia and progressive middle class, in order to formulate tactics and approaches to make demands on the capitalist class for revolutionary change. This revolutionary vision could benefit from elaboration on the requirement of a common alternative ideology – an organic ideology informed by a shared history of climate imperialism and the shared experiences under its domination – to overcome class reductionism, form a collective force and challenge the hegemony of green capitalism and neoliberal climate reforms through climate actions and a genuine climate justice movement. For Ibrahim, the workers’ movement is a powerful force ‘which with correct leadership and strong anti-capitalist ideology and programmes, can provide leadership and a platform to build a pan-national, regional, and continental movement to fight for a new society’ (166). In just over 150 pages, with 58 figures and tables, the author details the global inaction and hypocrisy of capitalist politicians and big business in addressing the mounting climate crisis and persistent underdevelopment of Africa, closing with identification and proclamation of the required popular forces needed to politically organise a campaign guided by a 10-point plan that includes climate reparations, technology transfers and debt cancellation, among other terms required for climate justice. In conclusion, Ibrahim argues that a successful climate justice movement must not be limited to organising and fighting for action in Africa, but must also link with a global socialist alternative to transform resource ownership and inequitable class relationships.
The author has provided an important contribution – illuminating, yet accessible – on the political economy of climate imperialism in Africa that should be considered by scholars and activists alike. The intersection of the global agenda, underdevelopment and conflict is virtually omitted; however, the brief warning of Western NGO influence in climate activism and the presentation of China’s extractive and imperial ambitions in Africa are laudable and should inspire further academic and activist consideration. While the book could benefit from some editing and spelling corrections, and details of movement-building strategy could be more clearly detailed, the author’s critiques of meagre reform measures, disconnected justice campaigns and illogical green capitalism inspirationally inform a new direction for climate action and emancipatory climate justice in Africa. Climate imperialism in Africa fills a knowledge gap in the global struggle for revolutionary climate justice and politics.