Is it an Equal World?

Is it an Equal World?

Extreme weather events don’t affect people equally: The Global South is often hit the hardest, despite emitting a small share of greenhouse gases – currently and historically.

Despite being the lowest carbon emitter, Africa is suffering disproportionately from the effects of climate change.

Although it has been more than three years since Cyclone Idai hit southern Africa, causing untold devastation in Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi, the event still impacts the everyday life of many people here. The cyclone had killed 341 people and dozens went missing, while more than 270,000 others were variously affected.

For more than a year after the cyclone, farmers watched their produce rot as they could not take them to the market since virtually all the roads had been damaged. The World Bank estimated the economic cost of direct damages – for destroyed infrastructure, properties, crops, and livestock – at USD $622 million.

When will they recover from the damage caused by a disaster that was possibly caused by activities and choices made by individuals in another corner of the world?

On 20 November, the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27), made a historic decision: establishing and operationalizing a loss and damage fund.

Many countries of the Global South face huge debts, increasing poverty and hunger, and the growing impacts of the climate crisis,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres lamented last November, as the world’s population topped 8 billion. World Bank President Ajay Banga has used the term, as has U.S. President Joe Biden and his senior administration officials, including the national security adviser and the secretary of commerce. More significantly, some leaders of the very nations the label purports to describe have embraced it. Standing beside Biden at a June 22 White House press conference, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that “lending a voice to the priorities of the Global South” is a central objective of India’s G20 chairmanship.

So what is the Global South?

Carl Ogelsby, an American writer and activist of the New Left, apparently coined the term “Global South” in 1969. Writing at the height of the Vietnam War, he observed that “the North’s dominance over the global South has produced an intolerable social order.”

The concept of the Global South as a synonym for the Third World began to gain traction in the 1970s, with the call for a New International Economic Order. In the 1980 Brandt report it rose to prominence where the landmark document distinguished between those countries with comparatively higher GDP per capita—which were overwhelmingly concentrated in the Northern Hemisphere—and poorer ones. The majority of the latter group fell south of what became known as the Brandt line ( an imaginary boundary running from the Rio Grande into the Gulf of Mexico, across the Atlantic Ocean, through the Mediterranean Sea, and over the vast expanses of Central Asia to the Pacific Ocean)

Increasingly, the Global South became synonymous with the Group of 77, a collection of postcolonial and developing countries that united in 1964 to jointly advocate for their collective economic interests and to enhance their negotiating capacity at the UN. Today the members of the G77, now 134 countries strong, regularly refer to themselves as the Global South, and the UN has launched multiple bodies and initiatives to respond to their needs and aspirations, including a UN Office for South-South Cooperation.

Many nations in Asia-Pacific, Africa, South America and small islands are particularly susceptible to climate disasters. Inequality is in a huge concern at the COP27, and countries and non-state actors are deliberating about climate finance and climate actions.

“Women and children should be at the center of climate decision-making”, UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Simon Stiell said at the opening of COP27. Climate justice must be served, and climate actions must be taken – is the common thought that emerges