By AFP - Agence France Presse
COP29 - Azerbaijan
The world doesn't listen to us, laments Kenyan climate scientist at COP29
Being a global warming expert from a disaster-prone African nation can depress Joyce Kimutai during the creaking COP climate summits, where politics often drowns out science.
“If the world was listening to science, maybe we wouldn't be holding these COPs,” the 36-year-old Kenyan climate scientist told AFP on the sidelines of this year's UN forum in Azerbaijan.
“We are too slow in our actions. We are afraid to take bold action. And I don't understand why.”
As the conference approaches its second week, the world is no closer to reaching an agreement to increase much-needed assistance to climate-vulnerable countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Without this money, developing countries say they will struggle to switch to clean energy and adapt as climate shocks intensify.
Negotiations have been going round in circles, with diplomats getting no closer to a consensus, testing those whose communities are at the mercy of increasingly erratic and extreme weather.
“It's frustrating,” said Kimutai, who was one of the main authors of reports for the UN panel of climate experts, the IPCC.
“I try to be optimistic, but honestly, there are days when I wake up, and I'm very pessimistic because you see the suffering of these communities of people who are vulnerable.”
Kimutai understands the price of climate inaction better than most of those huddled in windowless negotiating rooms in a sports stadium in Baku for COP29.
Kimutai specializes in attributing humanity's role in global warming to extreme weather conditions and collaborates with a respected global network of scientists promoting this groundbreaking research.
“But I prefer to stay on the African continent because I feel that's where my experience is needed,” said Kimutai, who lives in Nairobi.
There, Kimutai is not far from the data he analyzes.
This year, after suffering the worst drought in decades, Kenya was hit by rains and floods that killed hundreds of people and destroyed homes and roads in a costly trail of destruction.
Kimutai said that in the Rift Valley, a mountainous region where high school geography sparked his passion for science, landslides were becoming more frequent, seasons were unreliable, and grass and water were scarce for livestock.
Climate change was taking a “terrible” toll on Kenya, she said, but it was no different elsewhere in Africa or in other developing regions that are on the periphery of a warming planet.
“They are not prepared for these events,” said Kimutai.
Even rich countries would not be “spared,” she said, pointing to the recent deadly floods in Spain that caught a nation off guard.
At COP29, Kimutai is advising the Kenyan government, which is pushing for an agreement that commits the rich nations most responsible for climate change to better help poorer nations.
Donors are reluctant to commit large sums of new money and want others, such as China, to contribute, one of several sticking points at COP29.
Kimutai said Kenya was “carrying the continent” as head of the African Negotiators Group, which is seeking new funding that does not drive nations into debt.
“If a people go through three or four disasters in a year, that means going to donors four times... asking for money to respond. And that means you are constantly going into debt,” she said.
Scrambling for money to try to fix a problem caused by others was “humiliating,” especially when time to act was running out, she said.
But it's important that science helps “inform policy, so we can make the right decisions to have a better planet,” Kimutai added.
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