Ethiopian crisis and India’s climate pledge
Plus, South Africa’s dominant ANC party faces a challenge
Yee-haw! Hope you had a fantastic Diwali and Halloween break. This week’s news cycle was hectic so I’m trying to cover as much as possible but spare me if I have left out some developments.
The week started with the Group of Twenty (G20) summit in Rome, Italy where leaders from the 20 largest economies tried to address a wide range of issues including COVID-19 vaccines, international taxation, digital economy, trade and food security.
Days later, world leaders and officials met in Glasgow, United Kingdom at the COP26 summit aimed at tackling climate change. But I’m more keenly looking at the latest developments in Ethiopia where the Tigrayan conflict seems to be spiralling to another level. Of course, there’s lots more happening.
This day that year
2013: The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO), the national space agency of India, launched its first interplanetary mission ‘Mangalyaan’. The unmanned Mars Orbiter Mission (placed into Martian orbit in September 2014) made India the first Asian nation to reach Martian orbit and the first nation in the world to do so on its maiden attempt.
1838: Honduras separated from the Federal Republic of Central America — a sovereign state in Central America that existed between 1823 and 1841.
Ethiopian emergency
Ethiopia, Africa’s second most populous nation, declared a state of emergency this week citing an imminent threat to its “existence, sovereignty and unity” from rebel forces belonging to the country’s northern Tigray region.
The Tigray People's Liberation Front (TPLF) – an ethnic nationalist paramilitary group which is also a political party — said it has gained territory and is considering marching on the capital Addis Ababa, spooking the Ethiopian government.
Days earlier, Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed had urged citizens to take up arms in order to defend themselves against the TPLF.
As the six-month emergency was imposed, authorities in the capital city told residents to register their firearms and prepare to defend their neighbourhoods. TPLF is believed to be positioned less than 400 kilometres north of Addis Ababa.
How did this start?
The conflict started exactly a year ago when forces close to TPLF seized an Ethiopian military base in Tigray. The prime minister responded by sending in more soldiers and carrying out airstrikes to retake towns and cities.
For nearly three decades until 2018, the TPLF had dominated the country’s political sphere. They have since seemingly lost influence in the central government.
The Tigrayan forces have accused the prime minister of taking away powers from the country’s regions and states and concentrating in his own hands. Abiy has denied this.
Neighbouring Eritrea, upon Ethiopia’s request, is also believed to have captured tracts of Tigrayan territory.
This Vox explainer is from May, so some information may be outdated. But it explains the internal divisions well:
Humanitarian crisis
The fighting has led to hundreds of thousands of people in Tigray facing famine. Thousands of civilians have been killed and millions have been forced to flee their homes in the northern region.
The US government has accused Ethiopia of “gross violations of internationally recognised human rights”. It's planning to drop the country from a key African trade agreement.
Facebook removed a post by Abiy that urged citizens to rise up and “bury” the rival forces. The social media post was removed as it violated the platform’s policies against inciting and supporting violence, the company said.
Fun fact: Abiy was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019, a year before the conflict started.
Battle of our lives
World leaders, thousands of officials and delegates have gathered in Glasgow to try and reach a consensus on how to tackle climate change. The COP26 summit is meant to further the roadmap agreed to in Paris.
Many countries had already announced or updated their climate action policies in the run-up to this summit and have been working to build consensus on other environmental issues.
The conference started on October 31 and will conclude on November 12. Here are some the key developments we have witnessed so far:
India’s net zero target
As recently as last week, the Indian environment secretary was reportedly saying that ‘net zero’ was not the solution to the climate crisis. “It is how much carbon you are going to put in the atmosphere before reaching net zero that is more important,” the secretary was quoted as saying.
India, the fourth highest emitter of greenhouse gases, had not publicly set a net zero target as other major economies had.
What Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, in the final moments of his address to the COP26 summit, surprised the audience. He announced that India had set itself a target of reaching net zero by 2070. This effectively defined a backstop on when most of the world will cease to use fossil fuels.
Yet, the announcement has faced criticism. The target is a decade after what has been set by China (world’s largest emitter), Russia and Saudi Arabia for themselves and 20 years after the US and the UK.
The world needs to hit net zero carbon emissions by 2050 if we are to meet the 1.5-degree Celsius global warming target, scientists have warned.
Some like Bloomberg Opinion columnist David Fickling have argued that India’s 2070 target is a far bigger deal than it sounds. Fickling explains, citing Modi's promises, that it's possible that India’s emissions have already peaked.
It’s also to be noted that India has some of the lowest per capita carbon dioxide emissions among leading economies. New Delhi has repeatedly taken a stand that developing nations have little historical responsibility for global warming.
But there are other short-term goals India has set for itself: meeting 50 percent of its energy requirements from renewable energy by 2030 and reducing the total projected carbon emissions by one billion tonnes over the next nine years.
For India, and most developing countries the challenge is to secure adequate finance to make the crucial transition to renewable energy. This amount runs into trillions of dollars, according to Modi.
In 2009, ‘developed economies’ had agreed to raise $100 billion per annum by 2020 to help the developing nations tackle climate change. They have fallen short of this target. Reuters earlier quoted the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as stating that donor governments had contributed $79.6 billion in 2019 (the latest year for which data are available) and $78.3 billion in 2018.
“India expects developed countries to provide climate finance of $1 trillion at the earliest,” Modi said, calling for tracking of climate finance. “The proper justice would be that the countries which do not live up to their promises made on climate finance, must be pressured too.”
Bhutan and Suriname (and Panama apparently) have already achieved carbon neutrality. In fact, they are believed to be carbon negative — removing more carbon than they emit. Uruguay hopes to get there by 2030. Here’s a BBC explainer on net zero.
Stopping deforestation
More than 120 countries have agreed to end and reverse deforestation by 2030. The signatories include Brazil which has been criticised for failing to protect the Amazon rainforest. This is important because forests soak carbon from Earth’s atmosphere, cutting them releases it.
The pledge includes almost $19.2 billion of public and private funds for conservation efforts.
Julia PG Jones, Professor of Conservation Science at Bangor University, has written in The Conversation about why countries will still struggle to reverse forest loss.
Read the declaration on forests and land use here.
When in Rome
In their Rome Declaration just ahead of COP26, G20 leaders said their countries remained committed to the Paris Agreement goal to limit the global average temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius and to “pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. But they conceded that keeping 1.5 degree Celsius within reach will “require meaningful and effective actions and commitment by all countries”.
They also acknowledged the relevance of achieving global net zero greenhouse gas emissions “by or around mid-century”. As you can see, G20 nations said they would work towards achieving the goal by or around mid-century and did not specifically say 2050.
The G20 leaders’ Rome declaration can be read here.
What else?
South Africa’s ANC faces setback in local polls
The African National Congress (ANC), South Africa’s ruling party, has registered its worst ever electoral performance since the end of apartheid. Its support fell below 50 percent in this week’s local government elections.
The local polls were seen as a referendum on ANC, which was once led by anti-apartheid revolutionary and Nobel laureate Nelson Mandela.
The governing party has been facing mounting criticism over the state of the economy and has been tainted by corruption allegations. Former president Jacob Zuma, who led the ANC after Mandela, was jailed in July over his failure to comply with a Supreme Court order for him to testify before a judicial inquiry investigating allegations of corruption during his time in the country’s highest executive office.
According to news reports, the ANC has been blaming its poor election result on the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact, lack of interest among its own supporters and widespread electricity blackouts.
Though the opposition remains fragmented, ANC's main rivals, the Democratic Alliance (DA) and the Marxist EFF were the biggest beneficiaries.
If these results replicate in the next general election scheduled for 2024, the ANC may be forced to form a coalition government. This is significant because the ANC is the only political party to have held in the southern African nation since the end of apartheid — around 27 years ago.
Japanese general election
Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party secured a comfortable majority in this week’s general election. The result is being seen as a major boost to new prime minister Fumio Kishida, who took over from Yoshihide Suga in early October.
The Liberal Democrats, arguably the biggest political force in Japan having held power for the most part of the post-war era, won 261 of the Lower House’s 465 seats. This was a notch below the 276 seats it had before the election.
Along with its coalition partner, the Liberal Democrats now have an “absolute stable majority”. This gives them control of key parliamentary committees which will help them pass bills more easily.
In its election manifesto, the party said its government — for the first time — would want to spend 2 percent of ‘pacifist’ Japan’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on defence (roughly $100 billion).
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