From the environmental perspective, the current global recession has meant reductions in green gas emissions that are responsible for global warming and climate change. However, the recession is considered temporary, raising the genuine concern that its concomitant ecological good is not sustainable, and could well disappear when the global economy recovers.

Addressing these concerns requires two concurrent internationally concerted actions. The first is mainstreaming the economic recovery programs, concepts, policies and practices that privilege reductions in green gas emissions and seek to reverse climate change. Schemes and programs are needed that reconcile environmental preservation and national economic development in a way that allows the world to emerge from one calamity (the recession) by solving another (climate change), or at least laying a solid foundation for its permanent mitigation.

Second, while industrialized countries are being allowed to conveniently adjust their rates of green gas reduction to their vital economic interests and are being offered financial incentives and assistance to mitigate the negative socio-economic effects of such reduction, Africa, a continent which hardly pollutes in any significant way, should also be amply, sustainably and speedily assisted to acquire the tools, skills and know-how needed to mitigate the environmental, socio-economic and political effects of global green gas emissions.

Stopping short of reparation for the effects of global warming, such assistance to Africa should see pledges by major polluting countries as sacrosanct. Assistance should not be in the form food aid, the dumping of goods or high-leakage technical assistance programs, or mere foreign investments, the dividends of which are wholly expatriated. Rather, it should target direct provision of skills and tools for the sustainable acquisition solar energy, irrigation projects (not necessarily mammoth dams), rainwater collection systems, access to underground water and well-suited crops and breeds. It is significant that part of Article 10 of the Kyoto Protocol touches on such needs, but it needs to be broadened, redesigned and forcefully and fully implemented to improve the lives of ordinary Africans.

In order to see the urgency to counter the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on Africa – the same greenhouse gases that guarantee the economic prosperity of industrialized nations – it is necessary to underline that these gases worsen the ‘normal’ cyclical alternation of drought and floods. They are responsible, in Africa, for erratic and ill-timed rainfall. They truncate the seasons and disturb agriculture and livestock and adversely affect water sources. They induce deforestation, erosion and desertification, and spread malaria and tsetse flies in areas that were once naturally protected against them.

These challenges must be adequately covered in clean development mechanisms. It is equally significant to underline that alleviating the effects of the current recession on Africa and permanently addressing its environmental obstacles to economic development could reduce the stress on the socio-political structures of vulnerable African states, reduce local tensions, enhance external trade, help establish a culture of democracy and promote development, peace and security.