African Climes

The 25 th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or COP 25 in short, will take place in Madrid, Spain from 2 nd to 13 th December under the presidency of Chile. It’s clarion call this year is ‘Time For Action’. This is meant to convey the urgency of and rally people around the most pressing need of our times: to save our planet and ourselves from the very real threat of climate change. The conference, an annual event, is meant to discuss policy and international law around climate action. It is supposed to be a united and consolidated global effort to counter the biggest threat to our way of life this century: climate change. Notably, this conference is the last before the Paris Agreement comes into force next year, 2020. 2020 is also the year the United States will officially be able to leave the agreement signed in 2015. The meet will also be the last before signatories of the agreement issue new nationa...

I n the month of August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the IPCC in short, released a report on climate change and land . The IPCC is the body whose scientific work guides policy around climate change.   In this report, scientists assessed a wide range of material concerning the interplays between land and climate change. In it, the IPCC starts by noting that only a quarter to a third of land’s potential net primary production is being utilized. It observes that ‘land provides the principal basis for human livelihoods and well-being including the supply of food, freshwater and multiple other ecosystem services, as well as supporting biodiversity’. Now, land is both a source of emissions where it releases greenhouse gases, as well as a sink, where it absorbs them. It is important to note that all aspects of the physical environment are interconnected. Land therefore plays a huge role in the exchange of energy, the hydrological, nitrogen and carbon cy...