Africa Has a Central Role in Avoiding an Environmental Apocalypse

If we help it. If we let it.

Photo by Yasmine Arfao on Unsplash

The climate transition will bring increasing conflicts around the necessities we need to live, such as water, food, and shelter. Beyond these simple necessities, there are a handful of metals and minerals that are key to the energy transition (see Table 1). Africa is rich in three of them. The largest deposits of Cobalt are found in the DRC, while Manganese and Platinum are most prevalent in South Africa.

Table 1: Minerals listed in the critical minerals strategy, their uses, and the world’s largest producer.

Sources: IEA, 2021; IRENA, 2021; KU Leuven, 2022; UK Government, 2022; United States Geological Survey, 2022

China also has control over a number of key metals and rare earth elements, but there are two key differences between China and Africa. China has already gone through its large industrialization, and Africa for the most part, has not. More importantly, China is old, and Africa is young.

Table 2 shows the expected world population by region in the coming decades. China’s population has peeked, standing at 1.41 billion today, and expected to decline to 1.31 billion by 2050 and under 800 billion by the end of the century. Africa is and will continue to be young and energetic as most of the world gets old.

Table 2

Source: Institut National D’Etudes Demographiques

Africa wants to grow. It should.

Africa’s resources have for the past few centuries paved the way for the growth of Western economies. Many African resources make up the overabundant CO2 in our atmosphere, but those were largely burned in North America and Europe. Cumulative CO2 emissions from Africa from 1750 – 2021 are about 49.13 billion metric tons. Global cumulative CO2 emissions during that time were about 1.73 trillion metric tons. When you do the math, you see that Africa has directly contributed only 3% of global cumulative CO2 emissions (and I rounded up to get to 3%).

An Africa that is allowed to grow, is of little threat to worsening climate change. If the Global North (the most developed nations primarily in the Northern Hemisphere) cut their CO2 emissions by 40 percent over the next ten years, and the Global South (not-yet industrialized nations including all of Africa) grew their emissions by 40 percent over the same time period – I don’t know a climate scientist who wouldn’t sign up for that. The Global North is responsible for 90% of historical CO2 emissions, and that does not include China, which is now the top CO2 emitter in the world and is considered part of the Global South.

Africa is responsible for about 3.7% of current global CO2 emissions. For China, North America, and Europe those numbers are 53%, 18%, and 17% respectively. (This data is from 2017, so it is not supper current, but the direction of travel of emissions is currently in the same neighborhood. If these top three emitters cut their CO2 emissions by 40% and Africa increased their emissions by 40%, emissions from those 3 biggest emitters would go down a total of 12.64 billion tons. Emissions from Africa would go up by 0.52 billion tons. African emissions growth is not the problem.

The World Bank estimates that it will take $20 billion annually to adequately electrify Africa.

Africa should grow. Yes, we should push clean energy wherever we can, and natural gas over coal. But limiting African growth for the sake of climate is a joke, mostly peddled by countries in the Global North who are looking for excuses to not cut their emission.

Not a new growth story, please.

This is where an economist might say, “Africa has the potential to become a new consumer market to the world and help drive GDP growth in the coming decades while the developed world and China cut back on consumption as it ages.”

That might be the model that you see in your economics textbooks. But we don’t want that model, we don’t need that model.

If Africa’s manufacturing sector follows the model of most industrialized nations its emissions are expected to about double by 2050. As we saw from the math above. This doubling of CO2 emissions should be avoided, if possible, but this number is from a low base. The real impact to global CO2 emissions reductions will be from the Global North cutting back on its carbon-intensive way of life, not from telling Africa not to grow.

The Global North needs to drastically cut back on carbon emissions, and the Global South should be allowed to grow, but the Global North should help the Global South get there in the cleanest way possible.

When the Global North tells Africa to clean up its growth, Africa will rightly say, “Your first.”

Africa has a debt bomb. We should dismantle it.

As of the end of 2021, Africa as a whole owed $727 billion of debt. Africa’s debt as a percentage of GDP has risen from about 14% a decade ago to about 24% now, and on average African countries spend more on servicing their debt than they do on healthcare, though education spending still outstrips debt service.

According to a recent United Nations Development Programme report, 24 of the 54 lower-income countries at high risk of debt distress are in Africa. This includes two of Africa’s biggest economies, Nigeria and Egypt. 

You can tell from the title of this Substack that I am not a fan of seeking growth as an answer to economic and societal problems. However, I realize that my position is a minority one. The world in the coming decades is looking at a labor shortage and a growth problem. Africa will have plenty of people and will be poised to grow. A world that will still want growth will need Africa to succeed to provide the growth that the aging global North cannot.

It is therefore in the interest of the global North to work with Africa (and others in the Global South, to ensure that these debt burdens don’t get in the way of the growth that is poised to come.

This may lay the groundwork for a very fun word, an obscure financial tradition, and yes, a line on the London Underground – a Jubilee.

Is a jubilee a party? It depends on your perspective.

A debt jubilee is when a country or a large organization cancels certain debts and clears them from the public record. Some argue that with a world mired in debt, a debt jubilee is the best way to avert a coming great depression.

Debt jubilees date back as much as 4,000 years in ancient Summer, Babylon, and other areas of what is now the Middle East. Kings and monarchs would declare a jubilee when some debts (from failed crops for example) became a potential threat to social order if those debts were called.

So, a jubilee would be a party for those in Africa. It wouldn’t be much of a party for those in the Global North paying for this party, but they would have to admit that in the long run, it would benefit them as well. Allowing Africa to grow (along with the rest of the global South) would help replace the growth that is becoming more difficult to justify in the global North. Growth and healthy economies in the Global South would also help mitigate the coming refugee crisis that is expected to grow as climate change disproportionately impacts people from the Global South. People usually don’t leave healthy economies in desperation. Climate change will challenge this as some places in the Global South become more uninhabitable, but if the economy is growing, these people are more likely to stay where they are.

Whether the leaders of the Global North are this foresighted and could sell a Global South debt jubilee to their voters is another question.

There is a grand bargain to be struck here.

With the blessings of resources in the ground and growing human resources on the ground, Africa has the potential to play a significant role in the energy transition as well as the “growth” of the future global economy.

There is a great bargain to be had here. Africa has things that the Global North wants, and the Global North has things that Africa wants. Let’s see if we can strike a bargain.

Africa will face a disproportionate brunt of climate change.

Africa is saddled with debt from the First World.

Africa has rich mineral resources needed for the global energy transition.

Africa has rich forest resources that can be used for rewilding and carbon offset initiatives.

Africa has a growing young population, while the Global North is aging and shrinking in size.  

The Global North can help Africa mitigate some of the ravages of climate change.

The Global North can forgive some key African debt so the continent can grow.

The Global North needs Africa’s mineral wealth to make the clean energy transition a reality.

The Global North needs Africa’s forest resources to grow to offset current and past emissions.

The Global North needs Africa to become a new engine of growth as the Global North fails to grow or chooses to not grow by adopting a degrowth path.

The global north could lift Arica as a partner and equal to the benefit of both or look to keep Africa saddled with increasingly crippling debt and look to exploit African material resources and human resource wealth.

One problem from the African perspective is that Africa is not unified, not even close. There are fifty-four countries in Africa, most of them with very little power on the world stage. It is currently quite easy for the Global North to exploit Africa by dividing and conquering and using the tools of global order such as the UN, or the World Bank that gave disproportionate power to the winners of a war 80 years ago. The key minerals and metals needed for the energy transition are only in a few places in Africa, the DRC and South Africa – neither is in very powerful positions.

The Global North could forgive some African debt and pay for the rewilding of Africa in exchange for the key minerals of the energy transition and access to a growing and young pool of talent. If we are to avoid the worst of the environmental disasters that we face, the Global North needs to step away from a GDP growth-centric model and focus on well-being metrics, not economic growth.

Africa is a key player in allowing this transition and making it a just one. Helping Africa grow into a world economic power wouldn’t just be a reversal of the history of colonialization and exploitation, although it would be that. Allowing Africa to rise is in the best interest of the Global North.

By the end of the century, we could have an Africa that is seen as the equal of the global north in culture, wealth, and the well-being of its people. But that would require the Global North to give up some power for the common good, stepping off the GDP growth treadmill, getting out of the way, and letting Africa catch up. It can happen. But will it?

Don’t hold your breath. But before reading this, you didn’t imagine such a world, did you? Now you did. Share the idea with someone else and see what they think.