Africa’s Leaders Say Rich Countries Need to Quit Oil and Gas First

A swift transition is essential within the world battle towards local weather change. However not solely would that be significantly pricey in poorer nations, many African international locations have an abundance of pure gasoline or different fossil fuels, they usually argue forcefully that the remainder of the world doesn’t have a proper to inform them to not use it.

Confirmed crude oil reserves on the African continent complete a couple of hundred billion barrels spanning eleven international locations, with Libya and Nigeria among the many 10 greatest producers globally. The area is wealthy in gasoline, too: Mixed, Nigeria, Algeria and Mozambique maintain about 6 p.c of the world’s pure gasoline reserves.

As world leaders meet at COP26 in Glasgow, Some African leaders and activists are, for the primary time, vocally opposing a speedier pivot to renewables for his or her international locations. As an alternative, they’re urgent for a slower transition, one that will embrace a continued reliance on fossil fuels — significantly pure gasoline, which burns extra cleanly than coal or oil, however which nonetheless pumps planet-warming carbon dioxide into the environment.

Their calls come at a clumsy time.

This 12 months alone, scientists and researchers have issued quite a few reviews exhibiting the injury that the widespread burning of fossil fuels has induced to the local weather over the a long time. The scientific findings spotlight the urgency of switching to cleaner power if the world is to forestall world temperatures from rising 1.5 levels Celsius from preindustrial instances, a goal set by the Paris accord, the settlement amongst nations to sluggish local weather change.

Past that temperature threshold, scientists say, the chance of calamities like lethal warmth waves, water shortages and ecosystem collapse grows sharply.

However to be able to hit that concentrate on and avert the worst local weather catastrophes, analysts right here say, African nations must be supported financially by wealthier ones as they search various pathways to decreasing emissions. When the time comes, Mr. Gwemende mentioned, developed international locations also needs to switch technical data on renewables to Africa.