As Kenya’s Rift Valley lakes expand, swallowing homes, farms, and infrastructure, what appears as a climate anomaly reveals a reckoning with ecological limits, failed planning, and the illusion that water would stay where it was put.
Climate Politricks
A series on climate justice, tax justice and extractives in African spaces. Funded by Open Society Foundations. Guest edited by Grieve Chelwa.
At the UN’s annual Western Sahara debate, everyone gets heard except the Sahrawis themselves.
Africa’s first G20 presidency could mark a turning point for the continent — or simply another performance of green-washed extraction led by mining elites.
Hurricane Melissa made clear what COP30 obscures: the climate crisis still follows the lines of empire.
Behind the fanfare of the Africa Climate Summit, the East African Crude Oil Pipeline shows how neocolonial extraction still drives Africa’s energy future.
A Johannesburg-Cape Town high-speed line could turn apartheid’s corridors of extraction into a green spine of connection, industry, and justice.
As Mozambique faces escalating climate disasters, it is shut out of the very funds meant to protect it.
Development agendas framed around “resilience” promise empowerment but often reproduce colonial power dynamics in the guise of climate adaptation.
The EU’s hydrogen push in North Africa is sold as climate progress, but beneath the green gloss lies a familiar story of extraction, debt, and dispossession.
Grassroots activists and marine scientists in Algeria are building artificial reefs to restore biodiversity and sustain fishing communities, but scaling up requires more than passion — it needs institutional support and political will.
Shell's so-called divestment from Nigeria’s Niger Delta is a calculated move to evade accountability, leaving behind both environmental and economic devastation.
At Africa Energy Week, the language of resource sovereignty disguised a new form of climate denial that appropriates progressive rhetoric in service of fossil fuel companies.
South Africa’s pivot to electricity markets will be socially regressive, whether green or not.
A proposed green hydrogen project in Tunisia prioritizes European energy needs over local sovereignty.
Days before mass protests broke out across Kenya, the national government enacted a mass, unjustified forced removal campaign across Nairobi.
Since independence, Botswana has relied on its natural resources. But to secure its future, it needs to turn to its cultural heritage too.
With regional and global powers keen to take advantage of the DRC’s mineral wealth, it is hard to see how things can get better for the country in the short and medium term.
Although little evidence suggests a direct link between climate change and mass migration, Europe is using “climate migration” to militarize its borders.
Load-shedding, deepening privatization, and unaffordable electricity makes it difficult to imagine a pivot away from the neoliberal approach to South Africa’s climate crisis.
A new book shows how Europe is using the energy transition to exploit and under-develop the Arab world.
The marketization of climate action, epitomized by Kenyan president William Ruto, allows the super-rich to buy their safety while the rest of us are left behind.
Kenyan president William Ruto has reinvented himself as Africa's climate champion. But, his policy contradictions reveal that this is just his latest hustle
In South Africa, white climate groups are detached from broader struggles for economic justice and equality.
In the context of climate apartheid, a new scramble for resources, and debt crises, the Global South must find another way to be human.
Small scale farmers in Tunisia are caught between international actors and a domestic policy that protects corporations.
Held in Nairobi this month, the inaugural Africa Climate Summit is an important step for the continent’s response to climate change. Still, the disasters in Libya and Morocco underscore that rhetoric and declarations are not enough.
The city of Gqeberha in South Africa is an example of how water is increasingly becoming a commodified resource, benefiting the powerful and depriving everyone else.
It may seem obvious that a real transition to renewable energies is urgent, but not all transitions are the same or fair.
Climate negotiations have repeatedly floundered on the unwillingness of rich countries, but let's hope their own increasing vulnerability instills greater solidarity.
Communities whose land is being targeted for exploration by oil and gas companies are increasingly using the courts. South Africa points to good lessons for social movements about allying with the law.
Nigerians fleeing extremist violence at home take refuge across the border in Niger among an already fragile population. Together they proceed to carve out a way to live better lives for now.
Platinum holds promise for a net-zero future. But the promise of platinum cannot be founded on the broken promises endured by those who live in its spaces of extraction.
On this week's AIAC podcast: After an upswing before the pandemic, the global climate justice movement currently looks stuck. What kind of climate politics can appeal to the majority of people?
As coal is dying we must be prepared to absorb the transferable infrastructure of this industry and re-tool it for use in the emerging economy.
The world has changed significantly since the 2008 financial crisis. But the roots of today’s disorder, stretch further back than we think. This week on the AIAC Podcast, we discuss.
Total is creating a social and economic disaster in Mozambique, consulting the same playbook it uses in Myanmar and Yemen where it extracts resources and silences communities.
The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa was presented as a game-changer to address hunger. The consensus 15 years later: It failed.
Mozambique should not move forward with extractivist mega-projects. They always contribute to serious violations of human rights, cause irreversible damage to the environment, and deepen the climate crisis.
On the back of a failed COP26 climate conference: how e-waste dumping by European countries in Africa contribute significantly to climate change.
Let’s talk about the role Western institutions can play in achieving climate justice in the Sahel.
A new documentary focuses on using the soil’s carbon absorbent properties to solve the climate change problem.
Social policy is essential to creating more just African countries. Why is it not the norm across the continent?
Philanthrocapitalists are driving massively profitable schemes dressed up as eco-friendly, pro-poor solutions to climate disaster.
Local biodiversity loss and degradation of resources will have the greatest effect on communities in regions of biofuel expansion.
A key part of Maathai's work was how she creatively engaged with religious traditions, including Christianity and the Bible. Admittedly, her stance was somewhat complex.
No amount of clean technology, industrial growth or boosts to GDP will avert the economic and climate crises inextricable to profit-driven extraction.
Climate activists and leftists should tread cautiously when they use the climate argument to support fossil fuel subsidy reform in Africa.
Governments need funds for stimulus packages and aid to address COVID-19. But corporate tax avoidance and tax breaks for aid in African countries is undermining emergency responses.
As countries expand investment in decentralized renewable energy, its worth keeping an eye on who's profiting.
Can we move from temporary shame about our endless consumption of unethically sourced jewels and smartphones to concrete action?