When Ugandan climate justice activist and Unicef Goodwill Ambassador Vanessa Nakate visited Turkana last year, her heart sank.
“I spent the day at the Unicef food programme, which was trying to help mothers and their children who were suffering from severe malnutrition. A young boy who I had got to meet that day perished that evening,” she said.
“This boy literally starved to death unknowingly pursuing an immoral business model that has lethal consequences, particularly for those in vulnerable communities in the global south.”
Nakate is taking part in the ongoing climate talks in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. She said there is a need for leaders to unite if challenges facing vulnerable communities such as the Turkana are to be resolved.
“We need governments, legislators, and the courts to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for the lives they endanger. We need leaders to stop all fossil fuel developments, and we urgently need to enact a just and equitable phaseout of fossil fuels,” she said.
Nakate added, “I will not let the memory of the little boy from Turkana county fail. Leaders here in Dubai have a historic opportunity; they must follow the 1.5-degree Celsius north star, as CoP28 President Dr Al Jaber repeatedly calls it, and declare a just and equitable phaseout of fossil fuels.”
She said the phase-out will offer her generation and future ones a fighting chance to make their way in a climate-changing world.
Nakate said that if the ongoing talks fail to yield any solution, the credibility of the entire CoP process will be at stake.
“This is the moment for courage; the science demands a fair fossil fuel phaseout. The people demand that fossil fuels phase out. History demands a fossil fuel phaseout.”
Nakate added: “For that little boy in Turkana and millions like him, we ask the leaders to choose to be on the right side.”
She was flanked by We Mean Business CEO María Mendiluce and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research director Johan Rockström.
Nakate said every new development of fossils was sinking the lifeboat of humanity.
She decried that companies associated with fossil fuels have a lot of power over the CoP process, adding that they need to be dismantled.
Nakate said people are already losing their livelihoods and, increasingly, their lives.
She said a recent UN World Food Programme report said 22 million people are at risk of starvation in the Horn of Africa due to climate-induced droughts.
“Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies are making four trillion dollars in 2022 alone. Estimates of the annual loss and damage from extreme weather events around the world are in the hundreds of billions. One estimate put the figure at 1.5 trillion dollars, and that is per year.”
Nakate said that sometimes numbers like these are too overwhelming to take in.
"What we are talking about here are real people, vulnerable people.”
Nakate is among the over 800 leaders who have written a letter to the CoP28 president to support the delivery of a 1.5-degree-aligned outcome at the ongoing UN climate conference.
Rockström said there is a need for full reform in the CoP process to focus on delivery, accountability, science uptake, finance, and equity.
“We simply need to know from the negotiating phase into the delivery phase. If the carbon emissions do not bend in the next two to three years and we can see a divided part to really deliver all the promises made, we will lose the confidence of the world citizens out there.”
Policy and partnership manager for the World Wide Fund for Nature Africa, Darrel Halleson, said more than 600 million people in Africa do not have electricity or modern cooking energy.
"At the same time, we have pressure on forests. We try to look at energy access when we talk about energy transition. We are looking at energy efficiency and opportunities within the renewable energy space," he said.
Halleson said the transition does not just need to happen but also be equitable and just.
He said Africa should leapfrog to renewable energy space to reap enormous opportunities.
Among the 800 signatories are over 300 CEOs, 30 financiers, 240 NGOs, 70 scientists, as well as mayors and governors.