Climate Emergencies in Africa and the Crisis of Imagination(s)

PAST

Aug 30, 2023 • Nairobi, Kenya

This conversation aims to interrogate how Africa features in global theory on and policy practices of climate change and related phenomena, including the Anthropocene and “green transitions.” In particular, we seek to foreground how the experiences within African cities can nuance these discourses and practices.

We seek to elicit more voices in framing and debating climate emergencies in Africa, including from activists and scholars who don't work in the field. There is an urgent need to localise and decolonise our experiences of climate emergencies in both theory and practice. For the next generation of African urban scholars, it is important for us to work towards co-creating imaginations to stem — and theorise — the many interrelated challenges that continue to make our cities and scholarship unequal.

Nairobi is a timely location for this conversation: It is the site for not one but three international climate conferences the following week (Africa Climate Summit, Africa Climate Week, and GCF Private Investment for Climate Conference) in the lead-up to COP28 in Dubai.

Join us

We invite grassroots activists, practitioners, students and academics (in particular, early career scholars) to participate in this one-day event. The conversation will center around what we need to change in climate emergency discussions so that they may reflect our urban realities.

While our speakers are established academics and practitioners, we encourage early-career scholars from across East Africa to participate in this event. We seek to support co-learning, co-mentoring and network building to encourage democratic access to diverse urban studies platforms.

Note that this is an in-person event, not an online event.

Note that registration is closed and the participant list is finalised.

Peep the programme

Lecture

Africa’s Climate Justice Emergency: What are we facing?

In broad strokes and pinpricks, the lecture will bring together different perspectives on climate emergencies, in particular in African cities, highlighting the (mis)understandings and gaps within mainstream approaches.

Speaker: Njenga Muchekehu (Nairobi City Advisor at C40 Cities)

Respondent: Irene Asuwa (Community Organiser at Ecological Justice)

Panel Discussion

Subtext: What do mitigation, adaptation and resilience actually mean? (and for whom, when, where and how?)

The panel brings together academics and practitioners to reflect on the effects of climate emergencies and the viability and costs of different theoretical and tangible interventions that have been proposed as remedies in diverse African landscapes.

Panellists: Murefu Barasa (EED Advisory), Edward Borgstein (Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet), and Ruth Nyambura (African Ecofeminist Collective)

Keynote

Crisis of Imagination / (re)Imaginations for (Climate) Crisis

This keynote event, part of the “international hub” process of the UK’s Royal Geographical Society along with the African Centre for Cities and the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, will bring together scholars in Nairobi, Bengaluru and London.

Is social research and policy on climate change facing a crisis of imagination? Climate change puts in front of us a wicked problem that is exemplified by a simultaneously hyperconnected and massively fractured, divided and globalised world. In the current moment, both climate change mitigation and adaptation overlap with the simultaneous emergence of populism, nationalism, securitisation, and bordering. At the same time, progressive global negotiations on climate change fail to deliver substantial changes.

A question that many social scientists of climate change struggle with is if and how they can meaningfully conduct research on something that is only climate change. At the same time, a question for social scientists that do not study climate change is if and how they can leave out climate change. For experiences of changing climate are co-constituted by and co-constitute every aspect of our daily lives.

Do we need to (re)imagine things differently in this new and progressively different, co-constituted world? Before that, what will this world progressively look like, beyond the dominant imaginaries hegimonised by utopian techno-fixes? What is the role of social scientists of climate change and social scientists beyond climate change in this crisis of imagination? If we do need (re)imaginations for (climate) crisis, then how would Geographers, who are experts in Earth-Writing, respond with new stories of/for ‘the Earth’.

Speakers: Lauren Hermanus in Nairobi (African Centre for Cities), Chandni Singh in Bengaluru (Indian Institute for Human Settlements), and Ankit Kumar in London (University of Sheffield)

Respondents: Wangui Kimari in Nairobi (UTA-Do); Lalitha Kamath in India (Professor at Tata Institute of Social Sciences); and Mark Pelling in London (Professor at University College London)

Film Screening

After Oil

We are lucky to have a preliminary screening of the first documentary feature film by Africa Is a Country. After Oil is based on a series of articles from 2020 called “Climate Politricks” that dissects the meaning behind the phrase a “just energy transition” for Africa and its people. The film looks at the struggles of people across class, region, urban and rural in South Africa, Kenya, and the Western Sahara to understand the global interconnectedness of the struggle for a just transition away from fossil fuels in the face of climate change.

Respondents: Nonhle Mbuthuma (Human Rights Activist in South Africa), Johan Lorenzen (Lawyer at Richard Spoor Inc Attorneys), and Pascal Mukanga (Planner at Kounkuey Design Initiative)

Closing

Reception & Performance

Reflect over drinks on the conversations and contentions drawn out throughout the day along with a performance from Nairobi poet Nyash.

Let's have a different kind of conversation

We aim for these conversations to be an antidote to the talk treadmill, challenging dominant narratives about African cities and unsettling rote talking points and buzzword checklists in urban studies. And, most importantly, to ask ourselves uta-do?

Event details

When

August 30, 2023 • 9 am – 6 pm

Who

50 grassroots activists, students, practitioners and academics

Where

Kilimani, Nairobi (Kenya)

Detailed programme

(2) Programme

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