While world leaders and NGO delegates from around the world converged in Copenhagen for the 15th UN climate change conference, thousands of activists, writers, academics and artists gathered at [mp3] features interviews with representatives of different countries across sub-Saharan Africa who were at Klimaforum. Wahu Kaara of the Kenya Debt Relief Network provides a critique of the UN climate change conference and addresses the significance of the Copenhagen mobilisation for movements in Kenya; Demba Moussa Dembélé, from the Jubilee South campaign in Senegal, talks about the need for sufficient funds to flow from the North to the South to compensate for ecological and climate debt; Julia Agwu from the University of Nigeria in Nsukka gives an analysis of gender and climate change and the impacts of climate change on women in Nigeria; and finally, Mabule Mokhine of the Greenhouse People's Environment Centre in Johannesburg explains the process by which land dispossession in South Africa was consolidated at the end of the apartheid and the need for collaborations between global grassroots movements.

Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi’s desire to secure nomination as Africa’s spokesperson on climate change was primarily as a means to earn legitimacy among western powers and to 'ensure their tacit assent' as he prepares 'to violently thwart' the aspirations of the Ethiopian people for democracy in the May 2010 elections, writes Selam Beyane in this week’s Pambazuka News. It was thus ‘a foregone conclusion’, argues Beyane, that ‘Zenawi would forgo any viable long-term international accord for a short-term gain.’

A capitalist economic system dependent on fossil fuels and the exploitation of natural resources to generate profit has left people and ecosystems across large parts of the planet – including swathes of Africa – vulnerable to climate change, Ama Biney writes in this week’s Pambazuka News. The ‘derisory’ funding developed nations have offered to ‘assist developing countries to adapt to climate change’ is not enough to solve the problem, Biney argues. The real focus, says Biney, should be on ‘transforming the exploitative, unsustainable, profit-driven ethos that underpins the current system of wealth accumulation that simultaneously damages the environment’.

Having anticipated a predictable status quo of suits-and-presentations from the Copenhagen climate change conference, Rahul Goswami stresses the ultimate strength of local producers and their 'focus on food for people'.

Despite earlier combative language involving 'walking out' of the Copenhagen climate conference, Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi's heading of the 'African delegation' in Copenhagen resulted in nothing more than mere 'servile on-looking', writes Alemayehu G. Mariam. Roundly criticised by representatives from organisations such as the G-77 and the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance, Zenawi's 'leadership' simply facilitated developed nations in discarding Africa's needs in the battle to tackle climate change, Mariam stresses.

Nearly one-third of all water-related disasters occur in Africa. The second issue of Joto Afrika considers the relationship between climate change, the greater incidence of extreme weather events, such as drought and flooding, and the increasing scarcity of water on the African continent.

In his op-ed featured on All Africa, Frank Muramuzi of the National Association of Professional Environmentalists analyzes the World Bank’s disastrous approach to energy lending, focusing specifically upon large hydropower projects in Uganda.

It's really no surprise that a major split has occurred between developing countries at the United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen over the best way to help the most vulnerable countries, or that developing countries reacted furiously to the leaked draft agreement that would hand more power to rich nations, sideline the UN's negotiating role and abandon the Kyoto protocol.

On the ninth day of the Copenhagen climate summit, Africa was sacrificed. The position of the G77 negotiating bloc, including African states, had been clear: a 2C increase in average global temperatures translates into a 3–3.5C increase in Africa, writes Naomi Klein.

As the world meets to find ways of mitigating the impact of climate change, Nigeria, like other African nations which are at the receiving end of the effects of the global climate change, is counting its losses from the impact of the phenomenon.

Sudan wants to attract foreign investors to cultivate vast tracks of land that are currently unused in Africa’s largest country, State Minister for Finance Tarek Shalabi said.

As the United Nations Climate Change Conference approaches its final day, Salma Maoulidi writes in this week’s Pambazuka News of her elation at ‘the stance of African countries and other developing nations against a unilateral pollution emissions framework being imposed by rich, industrialised and polluting nations’. But, Maoulidi argues, unless key global governance structures are reformulated to make them relevant and accountable to global citizens, not just imperial and financial interests, the outcomes expected of international forums will remain elusive for Africa, no matter how well resourced and empowered the continent’s delegations.

At the opening of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, twenty UN human rights experts, including Olivier De Schutter, stated that a “weak outcome of the climate change negotiations threatens to infringe upon human rights”. The Special Rapporteur warns that only climate policies deeply rooted in a human rights regime can guarantee minimized impacts upon the most vulnerable.

Negotiators worked through Tuesday night without a positive outcome on providing financing for poor countries, commitments on emission reductions or a legally-enforceable treaty. NGOs were definitely not happy with the move to limit their access to the conference during the last few days.

In December 2009 the British newspaper The Guardian, China Dialogue, the billingual environmental website and the School of Journalism and Communication at Wuhan University jointly established the China Environmental Journalism Prize to recognize the best Chinese reporting on environment and climate change.

Burkina Faso’s first plastic recycling centre is paving the way for a new kind of development project. It provides a money earner to the poor while tackling environmental pollution. Local industry also benefits – the recycled plastic granules cost half the price of importing new plastic from abroad.

Few are more aware of the devastating legacy failure will leave than the teams of African negotiators in the Danish capital to hammer out a final position. As talks began on Dec. 7, the Africa Group had put numbers to the hard line taken at a preparatory conference in Barcelona last month.

As delegates from 192 countries meet in Copenhagen to discuss a climate deal, Percy F. Makombe says the talks should be about implementing the Kyoto Protocol rather than negotiating a new agreement. But will developed countries commit to adequate reductions in their greenhouse gas emissions?

Dictatorship presents 'a far more perilous threat to the survival of Africans than climate change', Alemayehu G. Mariam writes in this week’s Pambazuka News. But with the widespread acknowledgement that global warming ‘could affect Africa disproportionately’, and that the continent is ‘entitled to assistance to overcome the effects of greenhouse emissions caused by the industrialised countries’, Mariam argues that its dictators ‘are using global warming as their new preferred ideology behind which they can hide and ply their trade of corruption'.

The World Bank withdrew from the social welfare side of the Chad–Cameroon Petroleum Development Project (CCPDP) over a year ago. Identifying four broad approaches to assessing the project, Nicholas Jackson scrutinises the conclusions of several organisations, asking how it is that the project could fall apart so quickly while oil production continues 'as normal' in the midst of civil war in Chad.