I am seated here with my Nyamiyaga boys, shirts unbuttoned because the heat has become disrespectful.
The dust is everywhere. Polythene bags are flying around us as though they too have lost direction. We are trying to cool ourselves down with some expensive watermelon, each bite feeling like a small luxury in an economy where even fruit has started behaving like a commodity for the rich.
We laugh about it. That is what we do. We laugh when the heat is unbearable. We complain when it rains too much. We curse the roads when they flood. We blame the weather when crops fail. Then, when the skies clear, we forget.
But sitting here sweating in the heat, one wonders whether we have become too good at normalising the abnormal. Perhaps this is what climate change looks like before it becomes a statistic.
It looks like five men with unbuttoned shirts, like a farmer staring at a field that should have produced food, like a family buying food at a price they can barely afford, like a road washed away by rain, like a wetland turned into a building site, like a forest disappearing one truckload at a time.
And guess what, it looks like us laughing because we have not yet figured out how else to respond. The uncomfortable truth is that climate change is no longer merely an environmental conversation.
It is an economic problem, a fiscal problem. It is a food-security problem. It is a public-health problem. It is a development problem. It is now a question about the survival of humanity as we know it.
Climate change is eating away your breakfast, lunch and dinner. And what kind of a world will future generations inherit? An economy cannot grow indefinitely on a dying ecological foundation.
We have somehow constructed an economic system that measures the value of a tree primarily by the price of the timber after it has been cut down, a factory increasing production but rarely calculating the cost of the polluted river downstream.
We celebrate the cars sold but not the respiratory illnesses that follow. Don’t we call the destruction of forests “investment” and the restoration of forests “environmental expenditure”?
Perhaps we have got our accounting wrong. This is where we should crack the whip on the monster called capitalism. Not because markets are bad. Capitalism has done extraordinary things.
It has created wealth, encouraged innovation, transformed production and lifted millions of people out of poverty. But capitalism has a dangerous weakness when left without boundaries.
It is very good at counting profits and remarkably bad at counting consequences. Africa should be particularly angry. The continent has contributed relatively little to the accumulation of historical greenhouse-gas emissions, yet it remains among the regions most vulnerable to climate change.
Yet Africa is losing economic growth because of a crisis it did not create. The African Development Bank estimates that African countries lose between 5 and 15% of GDP per capita growth because of climate change and related impacts.
Think about that. We are trying to industrialise. We are trying to create jobs. We are trying to finance schools, hospitals, roads, electricity and other infrastructure. And climate change is quietly taking away some of the growth we are working so hard to create. Is Uganda immune?
Our economic life remains connected to agriculture, land, forests, water and climate-sensitive livelihoods. When rainfall fails, crops fail. When rainfall becomes extreme, roads disappear, bridges collapse and homes flood. When wetlands are destroyed, cities become vulnerable to flooding.
When forests disappear, water systems and ecosystems become weaker. When soils are degraded, agricultural productivity suffers. Public policy determines what society rewards and what it punishes.
If we make pollution cheap, we will get more pollution. If we make environmental destruction profitable, we will get more destruction. If we make green investment attractive, entrepreneurs will respond.
Taxation deserves a place in the climate conversation. It influences behaviour. Climate change is not waiting for us to be rich before it arrives. As my Nyamiyaga boys and I sit here sweating over our expensive watermelon, with the dust blowing and polythene bags dancing around us, perhaps we should not dismiss this as just another hot afternoon.
The heat is not. The watermelon is done. And perhaps the time has come to ask a different question: Who will pay for the profit tomorrow? Nature does not negotiate. We can ignore the climate. But we cannot escape the consequences.
The bill is already on the table. The author is a concerned citizen
The post When Mother Earth sends the bill appeared first on The Observer Media Ltd.
Follow the story
