Civil society acts as the conscience of governments and the people’s champion in all the major challenges posed by climate change. We have seen this in action in all the seminars and forums that were held during the past year to prepare for the 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) that is about to begin in Sharm El-Sheikh.

President of the African Development Bank Akinwumi Adesina underscored the need for robust civil society organisations in the fight against climate change in his opening remarks to the Civil Society Forum last month. The advocacy and oversight work of African civil society is crucial to the achievement of climate goals on the continent, Adesina said. The forum, which was held in Abidjan on 6-7 October, provided an open platform for influential civil society agencies to voice their opinions and proposals on the event’s theme: ‘Engaging Civil Society for Climate Resilience and a Just Energy Transition in Africa’.

Noting that 37 low-income countries and fragile states in Africa are the most vulnerable to climate change and depend on the resources of the African Development Fund (ADF) Adesina announced that the ADF had opened the Climate Action Window “that will support 20 million farmers to have access to climate-smart agricultural technologies, support 20 million farmers and pastoralists to have weather-indexed insurance, revamp one million hectares of degraded lands, provide 9.6 million people with renewable energy, and provide 840 million cubic metres of water storage.” He stressed, “we will need you, the civil society organisations, to strongly advocate for and support the ADF replenishment, as it holds great promise for supporting the most vulnerable in the face of climate change devastations.”

In a similar vein, Vice President for Power, Energy, Climate and Green Growth in the African Development Bank Kevin Kariuki told the forum that “despite being home to 20 per cent of the world’s population, Africa accounts for only six per cent of global energy demand, and just over three per cent of electricity demand. As a result, 600 million Africans lack access to electricity while one billion people do not have access to clean cooking... to address this evident energy poverty, Africa needs to at least double its energy demand between 2020 and 2040 to meet its development aspirations.”

In order to achieve its development aspirations within the confines of the goals of the Paris Agreement, Kariuki said, Africa needed to harness its renewable energy potential, decarbonise sectors such as shipping and transportation, and increase intra- and inter-regional interconnection of power grids towards the realisation of the proposed Africa Single Electricity Market. Civil society “has a critical role to play in promoting these ends and taking advantage of the opportunity COP27 offers to amplify Africa’s positions and forefronts the needs and aspirations of its people”.

This year’s Civil Society Forum transmitted the voice of African farmers to the highest decision-making levels. In his address to the forum, President of the Pan-African Farmers Organisation Kolyang Palebele sounded the alarm. “The time is critical. We must react quickly to the shocks of climate change affecting the African people,” Palebele said. He added that resilience should be integrated into national development plans and urged African heads of state to put the Malabo Declaration on Accelerated Growth and Transformation of Agriculture in Africa for Shared Prosperity into action.

The African Development Bank’s Vice President for Agriculture, Human and Social Development Beth Dunford took the occasion to emphasise civil society’s crucial role as a link between the bank and African communities. “It is in this sense that this forum has particular significance in consolidating African voices for COP27.”

As this forum made clear, COP27 must profile Africa’s concerns in order to advance the global agenda on climate change and that civil society organisations have a vital role to play in communicating what African local communities need to help them accommodate the detrimental effects of climate change.

ARAB CIVIL SOCIETY AND INTERNATIONAL PARTNERSHIPS

Like their counterparts in Africa, Arab civil societies had begun to prepare for COP27 months ago. Workshops were held at the national level for diverse segments of society to identify needs and propose viable solutions. Long before this, Arab civil society had formed many partnerships that have been working for years to address the challenges of climate change. In the process, they succeeded in focusing attention on crucial issues, foremost among which is the question of loss and damage. This is of particular concern to local communities that urgently need the mechanisms, facilities and financing to accommodate the effects of climate change, reduce risk, and minimise loss and damage.

A related and equally crucial concern is the question of displacement due to climate change and related disasters. The Arab Network for Environment & Development (RAED), a civil society network with members in 17 Arab countries, has been very active in this domain in partnership with the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) and the World Refugee Council. In addition to successful awareness-raising campaigns, RAED has been instrumental in including the climate refugee challenge in national and regional plans with the aim of minimising risks from potential disasters, preparing new living spaces and developing an employment map to absorb those who have lost their jobs. Much work has been done towards these ends in Egypt and Sudan on the basis of studies conducted in these countries in collaboration with the NRC on displacement and migration due to disasters resulting from climate change. For example, in Egypt, case studies have been performed on the impact of climate change on indigenous communities in Wadi Al-Natrun.

As the Arab world is situated in the world’s most arid region, it comes as no surprise that increased drought due to climate change is of central concern to Arab civil society. To address this issue and its inherent ramifications on food security, RAED formed a partnership with the Arab Centre for the Studies of Arid Zones and Drylands (ACSAD) and the Mediterranean Information Office for the Environment, Culture and Sustainable Development (MIO-ECSDE). Together, they held numerous workshops in the Arab and Mediterranean regions to raise awareness on the need to combat drought and safeguard food security. Their work has resulted in the increased resilience and adaptability of local communities to the detrimental impact of climate change on these regions.

Some Egyptian and Sudanese organisations in the RAED network have joined the Nile Basin Discourse (NBD), a network of civil society organisations in the Nile Basin established in tandem with the Nile Valley Initiative in order to strengthen civil society’s participation in development processes, projects, programmes and policies in this region. The NBD aims to promote the sustainability of the Nile and to activate and achieve the sustainable development plans of Nile Basin nations, primarily by increasing their resistance to the adverse effects of climate change, which means enhancing resilience and adaptability.

CIVIL SOCIETY IN COP27

 Given the pivotal role Arab, African and Mediterranean civil society organisations have played and will continue to play in environmental and climate change causes, the Arab Office for Youth and Environment (AOYE) and the Egyptian Sustainable Development Forum (ESDF), both Egypt-based NGOs, launched the initiative ‘Our country is hosting COP27’ on 26 January this year. Timed to coincide with Egypt’s Environment Day on 27 January, the initiative was sponsored by Minister of Social Solidarity Nevine Al-Kabbag and aimed to strengthen the participation of civil society and its organisations in the preparations for COP27, to build the knowledge infrastructure on the main themes that the conference would focus on in light of the recommendations of the 2021 Glasgow conference, and to forge a unified outlook for civil society on climate issues. The launch of the initiative was also an occasion to celebrate the contributions of civil society and, therefore, gave many NGOs the opportunity to relate their success stories in climate action.

‘Our country is hosting COP27’ has four main objectives:

- To create local platforms at the governorate level made up of representatives of ministries concerned with the environment (agriculture, irrigation, electricity, education, youth, environment, and local development), universities, the National Council for Women, and media centres and organisations with recognised expertise in environmental and climate affairs.

- To launch a climate change code of honour to stimulate commitments to practices that contribute to reducing climate change and its attendant repercussions and threats. A nationwide campaign garnered over a million signatures to the code ahead of the COP27 summit in Sharm El-Sheikh.

- To promote a genuine partnership between civil society organisations and the media. This bore fruit in the launch of the Media for Climate network which includes a large number of journalists and media professionals concerned with climate change and aims to disseminate awareness of the issues on the COP27 agenda.

- To create local platforms to generate proposals for projects that could be presented at the COP27 summit for funding and technical assistance to implement them. The projects, in turn, could form a cornerstone in the president’s Initiative for Smart Green Projects.

‘Our country is hosting COP27’ generated a wealth of ideas for green projects that were forwarded to the national committee that was formed to review them. In the process, it helped stimulate a grassroots sense of involvement in COP27 which, in turn, increased the impetus of the preparations.

Such excellent work gives concrete meaning to Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi’s declaration that 2022 be the year of civil society. It demonstrates that civil society organisations possess the abilities to provide technical expertise, raise awareness, build capacities, win and mobilise support and partnerships for their initiatives and projects, furnish material support if given the means and act in an ongoing oversight capacity. At the same time, however, they must be given the appropriate climate and tools to enable them to become an effective partner in development.

Participants in COP27 will be tasked with following through on the action plan that was finalised in Glasgow last year and that aims to prevent the earth’s temperature from rising above 1.5 degrees Celsius, higher than its temperature before the Industrial Revolution. State actors will now be required to summon the political will to seriously discuss and reach consensus on crucial issues, above all funding for climate adaptation. Civil society organisations taking part in the conference in Sharm El-Sheikh will have an important part to play in pressuring state parties to live up to their obligations. Industrialised nations have yet to meet their pledge to provide $100 billion a year to finance climate mitigation projects in developing nations, and it is well known that this figure is far below the funds developing nations actually need to contend with both mitigation and adaptation challenges.

Time is not on the side of the planet and developing nations in particular. Participants at COP27 must move beyond talks and negotiations to the phase of implementation. Towards this end, the Egyptian presidency of COP27 is determined to achieve balanced progress on all aspects of climate change, from actions to reduce greenhouse gas emission to actions to accommodate to climate change, and from rallying funding to promoting green technology solutions. The Egyptian presidency is equally determined to remain neutral. It is keen to hear the views, concerns and priorities of all sides and demonstrate it is worthy of their trust as it strives to bridge differences, encourage the spirit of compromise and produce concrete solutions acceptable to all.

*The writer is chairman of the Arab Network for Environment and Development (RAED) and the Egyptian Sustainable Development Forum (ESDF).

A version of this article appears in print in the 3 November, 2022 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly