America’s Dropout from the Paris Agreement Signals Important Lessons for Africa
The decision by President Donald Trump to ditch the Paris Climate Agreement to which United States is a signatory might have been a courageous effort to deliver on an election promise but, on a close examination, current estimates on disasters linked to climate vagaries show that his advisers got both the science and the math wrong when they touted economic gains as the main reason for the withdrawal.
Though predictable to the last minute, the announcement to withdraw nevertheless triggered a fiery of reactions with chilling waves of concern across the world; generating different interpretations and contextualization based on its implications and consequences both within and outside the US. Despite the varying perspectives on how to gauge the withdrawal, the immediate unifying premise of shared concern gravitated around finances, especially US pledges in contribution to the global climate processes such as the Green Climate Fund and other bilateral supports for climate change responses. The consolatory expectation for now is that China and European nations will step in and pick the bills abandoned by the US. This seriously overlooks the fact that US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement follows a similar pattern to what they did with the Kyoto Protocol, which at that time was also mistakenly thought to be a blip that could be easily filled.
CIFOR