Africa continues to grapple with plastic pollution, a waste crisis, and limited investment, activists report, as discussions unfold at the UN climate meetings in Azerbaijan. To shed light on these overlapping challenges, RFI interviewed campaigners and negotiators from across the continent.
Zitouni Ould Dada, a veteran of at least 15 Cop meetings, is attending Cop again. Previsiously he was there as a director with the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), this time he is with the FAIRR Initiative, a collaborative investor network focused on raising awareness of environmental, social, and governance risks as well as opportunities in the global food sector.
"If we keep going to every Cop and just make pledges and commitments, we're not going to change the world like that," he told RFI.
"We're not going to reduce emissions [by half] to the rate that is required... by 2030, which is just next door, and then reach net zero by 2050. So, there are many commitments and pledges made by countries, but overall the progress we are making is small."
He is calling on world leaders to renew their commitment to the net-zero carbon target and the Sustainable Development Goals that aim to reduce growing inequality and prevent recurring climate disasters.
"We need [to be more ambitious]," the Mauritania-born negotiator said.
Plastic pollution and fossil fuel disasters
Elsewhere, a recent report by Greenpeace has revealed the scale of environmental and public health damage caused by the global secondhand clothing trade in Ghana.
Titled Fast Fashion, Slow Poison: The Toxic Textile Crisis in Ghana, the report exposes the devastating impact of discarded clothing from the Global North, much of it fast fashion, on the environment, communities, and ecosystems in Ghana.
Every week, approximately 15 million items of clothing arrive in Ghana, but nearly half of these clothes are unsellable.
Many used clothes end up in informal dumpsites or are burned in public washhouses. This has led to severe contamination of air, soil, and water resources, putting the health of local communities at risk.
"Greenpeace has [previously] done...work in Kenya to look at how dumps have been impacted and overburdened by secondhand clothing from the Global North. It was time for us to look at Ghana because fast fashion is at the root of an environmental and public health disaster," Sam Quashie-Idun, from Greenpeace Africa, told RFI.
Ghana grapples with crisis caused by world's throwaway fashion
Many African countries rely on these imports for jobs and Ghana has the largest secondhand market in the world.
The really serious issue, however, is that the quality of clothing from fast fashion - mainly originating in Europe - is very poor, with many items made from plastics.
"That's why we decided to do a report on this - to assess the quality, the types of clothes that are entering the country and why they are being dumped and disregarded across Ghana," he said.
Other issues regularly raised by Greenpeace Africa include calls for investments in renewable energy solutions that empower local communities and promote universal energy access, an end to all new fossil fuel projects, and climate finance support for vulnerable communities impacted by climate change, with polluters contributing to generate funds for climate action.
The NGO also recommends diverting from offsetting and false carbon markets and biodiversity credit solutions, in a call addressed to the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) at Cop29.
The shadow of wars
For Tosi Mpanu Mpanu, the DRC's negotiator at Cop29, one overlooked aspect of the crisis is the number of armed conflicts affecting certain regions of Africa. These conflicts frequently undermine confidence in the multilateral system, with UN resolutions going unrespected, something that impacts both biodiversity and communities.
"If international law does not prevail in these areas, there is no reason for it to be authoritative in matters of climate action, Mpanu Mpanu told RFI.
The Congolese negotiator is also concerned about the re-election of Donald Trump as president of the United States.
"He is one of the climate skeptics," he added, "that he was in favour of the United States withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and even from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the text on which global climate governance is based," he said.
He thinks his return to power is worrying, especially since the previous commitments of the United States risk not being respected.
"This then risks undermining all confidence and creating a disengagement from everyone at Cop29," he concluded.
