Africa analysis: securing the right climate deal

For example, one key issue for Africa is the mechanism for reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD), which proposes to compensate landowners for not logging wooded areas (see “Reducing forest emissions” http://www.scidev.net/en/climate-change-and-energy/reducing-forest-emissions/).

However, the form of REDD favoured by industrialised countries applies mainly to dense forests such as rainforests.

This would benefit heavily forested countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, but those dominated by sparser woodland, such as Tanzania, would fall by the wayside - clearly an undesirable outcome for the continent as a whole.

In addition, it is not clear how to ensure that compensation from REDD is distributed fairly in countries where many people are subsistence farmers.

"There is a possibility that rich people would buy up land in order to claim the compensation," says Pius Yanda, director of the Institute of Resource Assessment at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. Such buy-outs could have devastating effects on poor communities, he adds.

There are likely to be similar accessibility issues with other funding instruments aimed at developing countries, including programs to help transfer climate-saving technologies and the African Climate Fund, which is being promoted by some African governments.

Gathering evidence

Attempts to address such concerns - and indeed the effectiveness of Africa's negotiating position as a whole - will be hampered by the continent's lack of data on the likely local effects of climate change. This is not a problem that Africa can solve in the short term, but it is critical to preparing for the future.

For example, the international community is seeking to limit the increase in global temperature to 2C, but even this may be too much for Africa, experts say.

"We do not know enough about the local effects. Perhaps even two degrees is too much for critical systems, such as shared river basins in Africa," says Belynda Petrie, chief executive of OneWorld Sustainable Investments, a company in Cape Town that runs the Southern African Regional Climate Change Programme (RCCP).

The RCCP is carrying out impact studies in three river basins in Southern Africa - the Zambezi, the Limpopo and the Okavango - to gauge the impact of climate change. But the data are unlikely to be ready in time to influence Africa's contribution to the Copenhagen summit.

It is up to African countries and regions to make sure they produce the evidence they need to make up their own minds about emissions control and sustainable development, Petrie adds.

"We should not sit around and wait for the international community to do this. We need to commit our own resources too," she says.