Time to adjust our lenses?

Abstract

Two CoPs or Conferences of Parties were held in November 2022—the United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC in Egypt and the CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora) Conference of Parties in Panama. With science having clarified that the window for decisive, effective climate action is steadily closing, one potentially encouraging outcome of the Climate Change CoP 27 is the agreement for the creation of a historic fund to compensate vulnerable nations for ‘loss and damage’ from climate-induced chaos. Many critics, however, have lambasted the Climate Change CoP 27 (Global Witness 2022) and it remains to be seen what assistance will be provided by the global north to countries such as Madagascar (Aljazeera 2022), where the island’s semi-arid southern region has been suffering from what the UN (2022) refers to as possibly the “world’s first climate change-induced famine”. While the UN’s World Food Programme and a bevy of smaller NGOs and charities have been hard at work to provide both immediate relief and longer-term preparations to help impacted communities cope with climate-induced shocks and other difficulties, now is the time for the government—in the spirit of the exquisite Malagasy concept of fihavanana (cf. Madaliving 2022)—to adopt a proactive stance when it comes to completing further work on pipelines to transport more water into the heart of the southern Malagasy sub-desert (Saholiarisoa 2019). The resources are there. It is also timely for the government to step up efforts directed at dealing with factors other than climate change that have contributed significantly to the scenario presented on international media during the past 4 years (World Weather Attribution 2021, see also video DW Documentary 2022).