Climate Change in Africa: is Africa sleepwalking to disaster?

To better understand the conversations, stories, and resulting narratives around climate change in Africa, we conducted a quantitative study comparing online media from mainstream African news sources, conversations on Twitter, and searches on Google, between October 2020 and September 2021.

Africa has become the face of the global climate crisis, but it’s Greta Thunberg who has emerged as the leading voice of activism on the continent – even among leading African climate advocates. To better understand the conversations, stories, and resulting narratives around climate change in Africa, we conducted a quantitative study comparing online media from mainstream African news sources, conversations on Twitter, and searches on Google, between October 2020 and September 2021.

There’s no doubt that Africa is the center stage of the global climate crisis, the continent that’s not only the hardest hit by climate change but also sleepwalking into a potential catastrophe, as the BBC asked in November 2019.

Let’s go back a few months, to January of the same year in Kampala where a 22-year-old started staging a solitary protest against climate change outside the parliamentary building. Vanessa Nakate is now one of the most vocal climate activists in Africa, and one of the climate movement’s formidable personalities. She’s no longer a lone figure and has inspired countless young people across the continent with her Rise up Movement.

The distance between that BBC story and the reality on the ground was glaring even if it wasn’t shocking.

In international climate discussions, Africa tends to be framed at one of two ends of the narrative spectrum, as a victim or through the decisions of global power players. Even in this narrative of Africa as an active change agent, it’s still painted as a poor continent that depends on rich countries for solutions.

It’s time to change Africa’s climate narrative to make it more reflective of a continent that’s leading the implementation of Sustainable Development Goal 13 for Climate Action, and a people who are actively engaged in combating climate change. To do this, we need data. So we conducted a quantitative study to better understand the conversations, stories, and resulting narratives around climate change in Africa.

Insights were gathered using a literature review of academic writing on climate change in Africa, online media to mainstream African news sources, conversations on Twitter, and Google searches between October 2020 and September 2021.

The resulting report, Climate Change in Africa: Are Africans sleepwalking to disaster? provides and verifies insights we have probably all suspected. It shows that while there are robust conversations about climate change in Africa, they are not led by Africans. If anything, Greta Thunberg has become the voice of climate activism on the continent.