Climate Action: Why does PACJA stand firm on a call to break silos?

An African proverb depicts it very well that if you want to go fast, go alone and if you want to go far, go together. It has not been easy for activists to come together in the fight for climate Justice. Since its foundation in 2008, the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA) consistently strived for climate justice and called all CSOs to come together in action and change for the interest of Africa.

The steady CSO engagement led to increased active membership to 2000 NGOs on the continent with the current presence in 52 countries in Africa.  Since then, there has been a commendable achievement.  Read the PACJA’s Decades of Achievements and Transformation here

This was possible through forging partnerships with other sister organizations in the global south PACJA intends to strengthen the voice of Africa and the global south communities in the area of climate Justice.

Dr Augustine Njamnshi, the Executive Director of The African Coalition for Sustainable Energy & Access (ACSEA) and Chair of Political and Technical Affairs, PACJA, insists on the importance of working together that benefit the pursuit of climate justice. He says that United we stand, divided we fall and that Africa United cannot be defeated.

But why always this call for unity?

It’s known that more than 630 million Africans in sub-Saharan Africa don’t have access to electricity. This exacerbates the socio-economic justice as Africa is grappling with the unprecedented adverse impact of Climate Change.  It is in the spirit of a unified voice for Climate Justice and energy just transition, that PACJA and ACSEA launched a campaign dubbed 630 Campaign aimed at spurring investments upwards of $630 billion to bring electricity to 630 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030, in line with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the Paris Agreement and Africa Agenda 2063.

This campaign is not Africa-centric but a global call for everyone to support the initiative. Dr Augustine said at the launch of the campaign that, “Together, we can reach unprecedented heights. Together, we can transform lives and build a future without anyone being left behind. We can achieve the impossible through solidarity and determination and push back the boundaries of injustice and deprivation.”

The campaign is concurrent with the Keep Your Promise Campaign launched by PACJA as well in 2023 to remind the global North that adaptation is key and that there should not be a diversion from climate adaptation. The Global Goal on Adaptation is one of the key issues to be addressed by the campaign which emphasizes that funding ambitions must converge and with greater accountability on developed countries in accessing much-needed funding for adaptation. It is tied to the climate Finance pledge under the Paris Agreement whose evaluation is out of track.

During World Economic Forum this year it was affirmed that 2024 will be another critical year for climate action while the Climate Finance Needs doubled to $1.3 trillion from 2021 to 2022. The recommendation was that the global leaders need to increase by at least five-fold annually to limit warming to below 1.5°C.

This is in line with the main central focus of COP29 to be held in Baku Azerbaijan in November this year, a COP dubbed Climate Finance COP. PACJA has been insisting on doubling Climate Finance in all its engagements and this is amplified in the call addressed to the global north by African youth to Increased Adaptation Finance more than double.

Empowering for long-term collaboration and engagement

The collaboration sought by the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance moves with empowering different constituencies mainly youth to take the lead and play a pivotal role in climate justice and climate Action. This is articulated in the objective of establishing Nairobi summer school on Climate Justice, a school that offers tailor-made course modules developed and offered by outstanding eminent scholars, experts, researchers community scholars and activists from both the South and North as well as by Africa’s leading Climate Justice strategists and activists.

For the four cohorts, alumni are the right products in shaping collaborations at the grassroots level, engaging policy and decision-makers from the south and north in negotiation processes together with creating positive platforms and engaging in climate action conversations. This supports PACJA in fostering collaboration as opposed to silos in the Climate Justice Advocacy process.

As a powerful collaboration, (between the south-north and south-south) is believed to be a driver to success, this year, again, PACJA firmly insisted on a strong synergy between CSOs from the two hemispheres to be able to influence the global decisions on Climate Finance during COP29.

This was stressed by Dr. Mithika Mwenda, Executive Director of PACJA during his remarks at the Opening Plenary of the Global Peoples’ Assembly on 22 September 2024  in New York City. Dr Mithika said “We must strengthen global solidarity. The crises we are facing, do not respect national borders, nor should our solutions. We must build alliances between the Global South and the North, strengthen North-South collaborations, partnerships between people, governments, civil society, and grassroots movements, between the present and future generations.” Read the entire Remarks here.

Breaking silos isn’t a need but a must to achieve climate action goals. The silos are believed to have characterized and slowed down the implementation of the Millenium Development Goals as said by Amina J. Mohammed, the UN Deputy Secretary-General, in 2018, during her remarks at  International Conference on Sustainable Development. She called for the interconnected and integrated nature of the SDGs to demand much greater policy synergy and coherence across the three pillars of sustainable development: economic, environmental and social. PACJA, as well, sees breaking down silos in the process of addressing climate action as the sole solution to achieve the global goal.