An opportunity for sustainable development?

Understanding that we are heading towards a devastating future can make one quite pessimistic. The international community has however tried to come up with an optimistic solution, embedded in the capitalist neoliberalism: green growth. 

Landscape of Sierra Leone

This is relevant in connection to Africa, because this continent is aiming for economic development while being faced with its most violent consequences. Africa is therefore

‘at a crossroad in terms of its development options. Pursuing the resource-intensive pathways taken by other parts of the world will accelerate its path to biocapacity deficit, with associated environmental degradation’ (AfDB and WWF 2013).

Sudo (2015) asks if there might be any ‘benefits’ of climate change to Africa, referring to the ‘latecomer’s advantage’. 

For example, considering that Africa is ‘late’ in industrialisation, it has much potential to focus on renewable energy sources and generate many jobs in this industry. Similarly, because Africa is ‘late’ in infrastructure development and urbanisation, it has the ‘chance’ to adapt the developments in these sectors to low carbon versions (Sudo 2015, 17).

Here you can see a graphic of the ‘system approach to sustainable development’: I chose this image because it nicely illustrates how interwoven the natural environment is with the economic and social sphere of development. It visualises what we mean when we talk about sustainable development and provides a theoretical framework we can use for assessing development projects and their sustainability. 

 (Sudo 2015, 4)

This figure illustrates the interactions and dependencies between  environmental, economic and social systems. For example, a social system can provide the conditions, as in the form of governance,  for an economic system to thrive, in which wealth is created. At the same time, this wealth creation can be based on trading (economic system) with natural resources (environmental system). In the ideal scenario of ‘sustainable development’ there is a balanced ‘exchange’ between these systems and the environmental system will continue to provide natural capital for the economic and social system in the future. However in the (not so ideal) real world scenario, the ecological system receives little returns from the economic or social system, as for example in pollution or resource depletion (Sudo 2015, 4-5).

Now I want to talk a bit about one aspect of sustainable development, which is the creation of renewable energy systems. I can easily apply this to the figure above: renewable energy is produced by the economic system (e.g. engineers installing solar panels and producing energy) by taking resources from the environmental system (e.g. solar radiation) which will benefit the social system (e.g. providing more households with energy). This new energy source removes the necessity to develop electrical grid infrastructure that harms the environment and can provide people with new opportunities to increase their wealth, which will benefit the economy.

It has been argued that Africa should focus on the development of small-scale renewable energy systems, rather than aim for the costly electric power infrastructure of developed countries (Bugaje 2004). Due to the abundance of renewable energy resources in Africa, the production of solar energy, wind energy, wood and biomass as well as biogas could benefit Africa’s development in a sustainable way (Bugaje 2004, 2). In Nigeria, the traditional energy source (especially for rural populations) is fuel wood, due to its low prices and easy accessibility (Bugaje 2004, 2). It is used for cooking and heating and one major environmental impact of fuel wood consumption is desertification, increasingly affecting Nigeria’s savannah heart. However, there would be much potential for switching to alternative energy source: It was already estimated in 1987 that the total energy needs of the nation could be met by converting only 0.1% of the total solar energy radiant on Nigeria’s land mass at an efficiency of 1% (FMST 1987). The lack of funding for solar energy research and missing institutional framework has prevented the creation of renewable energy policies. By contrast, Egypt established the  ‘New and Renewable Energy Authority’ already in 1986 and has tried to generate 3% of its total electricity from solar and wind (Bugaje 2004, 4). 

References:

AfDB and WWF (2013). Africa Ecological Footprint Report: Green Infrastructure for Africa’s Ecological Security. AfDB and WWF International, Available from .

Bugaje, I. (2004). Renewable energy for sustainable development in Africa: a review. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 10(6), pp.603-612.

FMST (1987).  Policy guidelines on energy for Nigeria. The Federal Ministry of Science and Technology (FMST) Abuja, Nigeria; 

OECD (2013). Putting Green Growth at the Heart of Development. OECD Green Growth Studies, OECD Publishing, Paris.

Sustainabledevelopment.un.org. (2016). Green economy .:. Sustainable Development Knowledge Platform. [online] Available at: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics/greeneconomy/decisions [Accessed 6 Nov. 2016].