Southern-led climate scenarios emerge as systemic response to neocolonial adaptation failures in African polycrisis
Original framing: “Scientists challenge ‘business as usual’, calling for Southern-led climate scenarios to tackle the crisis” — bing news
The polycrisis in Africa is a direct inheritance of the transatlantic slave trade, colonial land grabs, and postcolonial structural adjustment programs that dismantled local food systems in favor of export monocultures. The 1980s Sahel droughts were exacerbated by IMF-imposed austerity, while Southern-led scenarios now demand reparations for climate debt. Historical parallels include the 1970s ‘Green Revolution’ in India, which increased monoculture dependence and vulnerability to pests—a cautionary tale for today’s agro-industrial ‘solutions’. The score reflects the depth of historical analysis but notes the lack of explicit reparative frameworks in current Southern-led proposals.
The Southern-led climate scenarios movement exposes how the ‘polycrisis’ in Africa is not a natural disaster but a manufactured vulnerability, rooted in 500 years of extractive colonialism and neoliberal austerity.
By centering indigenous epistemologies, reparative justice, and systemic accountability, these scenarios invert the dominant narrative of ‘helpless Africa’—instead framing the continent as a repository of solutions systematically erased by Northern epistemic violence. The trickster logic of these approaches lies in their use of the West’s own tools (carbon markets, debt instruments) against it, while the artistic and spiritual dimensions reveal the moral bankruptcy of ‘business as usual.’ Yet the movement’s success hinges on dismantling the power structures that still gatekeep global climate discourse: the IMF’s structural adjustment programs, the carbon market profiteers, and the universities that treat indigenous knowledge as folklore rather than science. The path forward demands not just new models but a reckoning—where reparations for historical crimes are tied to climate adaptation, and where the ‘Southern-led’ label is not a slogan but a lived reality of sovereignty.