Africa In Transition

Ocean Farming, Desert Greening, Earth-ships, and renewable energy is just the start of the New African Golden Age! Yet Climate Change brings its own problems.

Delivering the benefits of a new climate economy requires ambitious action across key economic systems, creating the conditions for the phaseout of coal and rapid scale-up of renewables in the energy sector; investing in shared, electric, and low-carbon transport in cities; scaling up sustainable food and land use systems, including forest landscape restoration; African nations are in an enviable position to build sustainable infrastructure they do not have to dear down an existing system Europe did it for them 50 years ago out of spite. African leadership is actively targeting investment to create and expand a resilient water infrastructure; and reducing emissions from key industrial value chains, such as plastic by converting to Hemp plastics and other materials that are biodegradable and embracing solar and wind as an integral addition to other fuels. Nigeria, which struggles with electricity access for a majority of its population, has set a renewable energy use target of 30 percent by 2030.

South Africa’s Carbon Tax Act, could reduce the country’s emissions by 33 percent relative to the baseline. South Africa’s recent renewable energy actions have led to solar and wind prices lower than those of the national utility. Of ALL the continents Africa will have the least problems despite global warming when it comes to food production arable lands and water resources. Africa’s most oil- and gas-rich countries should be leading the energy revolution. Beyond the energy sector, food and land use systems—including the agriculture and forestry sectors—are integral to sub-Saharan Africa’s economy, accounting for 70 percent of livelihoods and almost one-quarter of regional GDP. In fact, new business opportunities in sustainable food and land use systems could deliver $320 billion each year by 2030 across sub-Saharan Africa.[15] These opportunities include $120 billion in forest ecosystem services and restoration of degraded land, $100 billion in increased agricultural yields, and $100 billion in supply chain efficiency improvements and enhanced value-adding capacity.

Africa’s transition to a new climate economy is underway in many places, and the nations are finding they no longer need or want foreign aid that slows their progress; the majority of nations much prefer gaining knowledge to do it on their own. One movement gaining traction that started in Malawi is the building of Earthship Housing!

Earthship design hinges on 6 principles: 1) Thermal/Solar Heating & Cooling; 2) Solar & Wind Electricity; 3) Contained Sewage; 4) Building with natural & recycled materials; 5)Water Harvesting; 6) Food Production. Earthships are off-grid, self-reliant houses built from tires, cans, glass bottles and mud and concrete that have long been an option for those looking to build utilizing cheap materials but getting high end quality work from it! Europeans have for decades been dropping their refuse into African nations and now there is a way to profit greatly from it while removing the refuse and utilizing it to build beautiful and sustainable green houses! Earthship communities treat their own waste, collect their own water, grow their own food, and regulate their own temperature by relying on the sun, rain and earth, which adherents call natural "phenomena"

The creator of this movement Mike Reynolds, 76, has been building these structures which he calls "vessels" since the 1970s when, after graduating from architecture school at the University of Cincinnati he began studying structures in Mexico and wrote a bestselling book on how to make these houses. On top of the aesthetic beauty, Earthships are perfect for a climate changed environment. provide their own electricity through photovoltaics (converting light into electricity) and wind power. They contain and treat their own waste water. They catch water and can even act as interior greenhouses to grow food, treating the water at the same time.

The way the home is built also creates an air cooling system that requires no electricity. Earthships utilize a natural ventilation system. The outside air is drawn through underground vent tubes through the building. They are buried underground in order to cool the air. The tubes enter the building on the backside and flow through the living space and greenhouse. Earthship houses do not need a typical HVAC system to heat and cool the indoor space in order for it to remain comfortable in most climates or locations. This is possible through passive solar heating and cooling. For cooling in warmer climates, tire walls will stay cool since they are filled with dirt. Any climate is good for Earthships, the tropics are easy to maximize the most amount of comfort, electricity, water and food.

Nations that are set to have the most drastic changes due to climate change are geographical locations with “unfavorable starting conditions” that show they will be most harmed by the effects of climate change: Saudi Arabia, Bangladesh, India, New Zealand, Iceland, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland. The compound interest of climate change means that people have also left home due to water shortages, increasing hunger, and other barriers to necessary natural resources. In short, climate change has made parts of the world — areas that people have called home for millennia — uninhabitable. In Bangladesh, where 75% of the country is below sea level, rising ocean waters have uprooted and affected 25.9 million people. Estimates suggest that, by 2050, the rising sea level will submerge another 20% of the country, displacing a further 22 million!

According to the Groundswell Report of the World Bank, the number of internal climate migrants in the East Asia and Pacific region will reach 50 million by 2050, representing 2.5% of the regional population. The lower Mekong sub-region in Southeast Asia is projected to see between 3.5 million and 7 million new climate migrants between now and 2050.The World Bank estimates that South Asia will face a crisis of 50 million climate refugees each year by 2050 Climate hotspots in South Asia from where out-migration may be high may include the deltaic regions of the Sundarbans, coastal towns and cities like Mumbai, the semi-arid plains of Pakistan, the rice-growing areas of northeast Bangladesh, and the northern Indo-Gangetic plains between Delhi and Lahore. Most of these refugees will be seeking migration into Sub-Saharan African nations rather than the flooded (by sea rise) and xenophobic European nations. For more than a decade, the Chinese government has invested hugely in Africa. The foundation for this partnership was laid in 1996, when President Jiang Zemin proposed the creation of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) in a speech at the Organization of African Unity headquarters in Addis Ababa.

China’s Export-Import Bank extended $67.2 billion in loans to sub-Saharan African countries between 2001 and 2010—$12.5 billion more than the World Bank.

Although there are no official figures, evidence suggests that at least a million private Chinese citizens have arrived on African soil since 2001, many entirely of their own initiative, not by way of any state plan.“Chinese government projects in many nations have failed because the Chinese bureaucrats don’t know how to communicate respectfully with Africans.