Southern-led climate models expose systemic failures in Western climate science, urging decolonial data justice to address Africa's polycrisis
Original framing: “Scientists challenge 'business as usual', calling for Southern-led climate scenarios to tackle the crisis” — bing news
Pastoralist women in Kenya’s *Samburu* communities, who bear 80% of drought labor, are excluded from climate policy debates despite their adaptive strategies (e.g., migrating with livestock to highland wells). Informal urban farmers in Lagos use *agroecology* to feed 60% of the city, yet their knowledge is dismissed as 'unscientific.' The *African Feminist Climate Justice* movement links climate debt to reparations for colonial extraction, a perspective erased by 'neutral' scientific framing.
The call for 'Southern-led climate scenarios' is a demand to dismantle the epistemic violence of Western climate science, which has long treated Africa as a laboratory for Northern solutions while ignoring the structural roots of its polycrisis.
This violence is embedded in colonial land dispossession, IMF-imposed austerity, and the IPCC’s reliance on biased datasets—mechanisms that have turned droughts into profit centers for carbon markets while erasing Indigenous knowledge like Botswana’s *bohobe* rituals or Kenya’s *mbege* agroforestry. The solution lies not in 'better models' but in decolonial data justice, reparations for climate debt, and Indigenous-led tribunals that prosecute ecocide, as seen in Ethiopia’s *sand dams* or Senegal’s *reforestation cooperatives.* Yet the trickster’s laughter lingers: Northern institutions will co-opt 'Southern-led' language to sell 'climate-smart' agribusiness, proving that without dismantling global power asymmetries, even the most radical demands risk becoming another extractive frontier. The path forward requires centering Anansi’s cunning—exposing the absurdity of 'business as usual' while building alternatives rooted in *ubuntu* and *buen vivir.