For decades, the Global North was seen as the pinnacle of progress, setting the bar for the Global South. For Nils, a journey from Germany to Cameroon flipped this narrative on its head. In a world struggling with environmental limits due to the North’s irresponsible resource consumption, can the South’s small environmental footprint provide the solutions?
COP28 in Dubai ended on 13 December 2023, leaving me exhausted and frustrated. The biggest injustice of climate change remained unchanged: those who contribute the least suffer the most. This reality drove me to join the Loss and Damage Youth Coalition, campaigning for accountability from major polluters. Yet, despite two weeks of talks among nearly 100,000 participants, the fossil fuel lobby continued to block effective action. The outcomes, including conclusions on the first global stocktake, once again fell short of the actions needed. Like many COP decisions, it calls for the Global North to support the Global South in their climate action efforts.
Outdated Understanding of Global South and North Roles
I am convinced: When it comes to reparations for losses and damages caused by climate change, it is absolutely vital that the ones who caused it have to pay for it. In those cases, it has nothing to do with well-meaning support. When climate change leads to extreme weather events which kill people, destroy property or economic opportunities in countries who have contributed little to climate change we talk about legal and moral obligations. But the idea of the Global North being supposed to “help” and “develop” the Global South is also being applied in many fields where it does not make sense anymore in today’s world.
Nils from Germany and his friend Dorcas from Kenya at COP28. The ratio of the balloon’s volumes illustrates the ratio of the cumulative greenhouse gas emissions of their countries. (Photo: Private)
What was agreed on at COP28 basically means the countries causing climate change should now support countries with a responsible environmental footprint in mitigating climate change. This topsy-turvy and old-fashioned perspective on the world is still omnipresent, not only in UN organisations such as the UNFCCC. It is time to rethink the understanding of the roles of the Global South and North.
Lessons from Cameroon: Discovering My Role as a Learner
But actually, my eye-opening journey didn’t start at COP28, but elsewhere. After graduating from high school in Germany, I got the chance to participate in a German governmental program which allows youth from Germany to volunteer in Global South countries and vice versa. I was placed in an educational organisation in Cameroon. Of course, an integral part of the programme were seminars on collaboration between Europe and Africa instead of “one-sided help”. But I would lie to say that I did not remain with a slight thought of wanting to “help the people in Cameroon” when I arrived.
Very soon, I noticed who was being “helped” and who learned most during my stay in Cameroon: It was myself. Firstly, this comprised skills I had never needed in Germany such as washing my laundry by hands. But there was something else that was of great value for my environmental work in Germany.
Lessons from Cameroon: Transforming my Environmental Perspective
My activism peers and I had always been campaigning to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and to use the resources that the planet provides us responsibly and efficiently. Cameroon was way ahead of Germany in small emissions and efficient use of resources. When my host family in Cameroon slaughtered a chicken, we ate it entirely – from the head to the feet.
When I learned to navigate around by myself, I used shared taxis. Most cars on the streets of Cameroon’s capital Yaoundé were shared taxis and any available seat would always be used. This was particularly interesting, because when I came back to Germany, I heard of something called “ride pooling services”. These are mixtures of shared taxis and minibuses which many European cities, including my home Hamburg, introduce as a very sustainable new innovation for transportation. An “innovation” that is already the most common means of transportation in Cameroon and most other African countries.
Planetary Boundaries
Some years later, my studies in environmental engineering brought me to the Arctic island of Svalbard. Some decades ago, the water surrounding Svalbard was completely covered by bright white ice for a long time of the year. It was so thick that people used to drive cars on the frozen fjords. The ice reflected most of the incoming solar radiation directly back into space. Only a very small proportion of the contained energy remained on the earth as heat. This effect kept Svalbard’s climate very cold. With the warming climate, the extent of the sea ice is declining.
Nils and his professor during field work on the sea ice around Svalbard. (Photo: private)
When I was on Svalbard in 2022, we were able to swim in the cold dark ocean throughout the year. The dark water absorbs most of the sun’s radiation and the contained energy warms up the water. With warmer water, even more ice melts. This is a self amplifying process that can get out of control. The irreversible damage to the ecological, economical and social systems of the planet is barely predictable. Seeing the ice disappear with my own eyes was truly alarming. But the climate is not the only environmental crisis where we are approaching such tipping points. Scientists have identified a total of 9 such biophysical boundaries. But what do the melting ice and the planetary boundaries have to do with the living conditions in Cameroon?
Doughnut Economics: New Challenges in the 21st Century
I found out, when I read Kate Raworth’s “Doughnut Economics”, the most eye-opening book I’ve ever read. It deals with the challenge for humanity of the 21st century: Meet the needs of the people without transgressing any of these biophysical boundaries. With Doughnut Economics, the goal of successful development is to create an economy that establishes good conditions for people to live, such as good income and work for everyone, good access to healthcare and gender equality, while at the same time making sure that these conditions can be sustained permanently. This means without reaching the planet’s tipping points.
In the video below, I summarise the Doughnut Economics model.
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In this concept, a country’s state of development can be determined using 21 parameters which contrast a country’s success in meeting people’s needs with its success in respecting the planetary boundaries. It represents the development challenges of the 21st century way better and in a more diverse way than looking at the GDP only, which only measures the monetary value of a country’s market.
With this tool in hand, we find that both countries from the Global South and North are similarly far away from successful development. They just miss the target from different sides. Countries of the Global South such as Cameroon succeed in sticking to the planetary boundaries. At the same time, they are often still falling short of meeting people’s needs for a good life, such as high life expectancy or good access to sanitation. The impacts of climate change often worsen these conditions. For countries of the Global North like Germany, however, it is the opposite. They fail to respect the planet’s biophysical boundaries by consuming unreasonable amounts of raw materials for an often wasteful lifestyle and emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases. But they usually attain a good social foundation for people’s well-being.
In the two graphics below, you can see how Kenya (1) and Germany (2) score in the Doughnut. (Source: Country Comparisons, Fanning et al. (2022), https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/)
Shifting to Partners with Different Strengths
Countries’ scores in the Doughnut Theory
Each dot represents one country. The size of the dots corresponds to the population.
(Source: Biophysical Boundaries Transgressed versus Social Thresholds Achieved by Nation, O’Neill et al. (2018) with edits, https://goodlife.leeds.ac.uk/national-snapshots/challenge/).
The book had completely changed my perspective on the Global South and North. Instead of seeing each other as “more advanced” or “backward”, I noticed that we are partners with different strengths. The North achieves many social goals. The South realises an environmental footprint which is in line with the planetary boundaries. Each respective partner’s strength is where the other one still has the potential to improve. And this change in perspective unleashes a tremendous potential to mutually learn from each other and collaborate. With this in mind, it becomes obvious where most knowledge on how to live within the means of the planet is located: In the countries of the Global South. So the UNFCCC’s conception, which fails to recognise this context, started feeling very much behind the times for me.
South to North Development Cooperation
Shifting towards this 21st-century understanding of the Global North’s and South’s roles has implications way beyond the UNFCCC. Let’s imagine an African country founding its own development agency, sending experts to Europe to help European countries reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. What knowledge could they bring along? One of the best ways to reduce the footprint of many goods is to use them as long as possible. African countries have very efficient systems for repair and reuse of many kinds of goods instead of producing more and more. But also when we want to design sustainable European supply chains, for example for food production, a glimpse into African ones could help. Here the food demand is often supplied very locally and seasonally. Unfortunately, transfer of knowledge in this direction is still very rare. But it could be a game changer, allowing development cooperation that is truly on eye level.
Going from Europe to Africa to Study
Nils and his Master class in Soil and Water Engineering at Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology in Kenya on their first day in September 2024. (Photo: Private)
In Europe, our biggest development challenge in the 21st-century is to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and our environmental footprint to a level that the planet can support in the long-term. So Global South countries, who have already achieved that, are the best examples for us to look at when we search for solutions to the crisis. With this in mind, it was very clear where I had to go to pursue my masters studies in environmental engineering: To Africa. Being a German student at a Kenyan university, I can now fully act out my role as a learner in the Euroafrican context. This places me in a role that is very different from my previous stay in Cameroon. I am not just studying. I am committed to put South-to-North knowledge transfer into practice – and hope to see more such initiatives in the future.
