More Loss, More Damages: Africa in the Green Transition
From Nairobi’s floods to the Finance Bill protests, Kenya’s green transition reveals not a break from the past but a deepening of elite-led extraction. Framed as opportunity, it is climate capitalism by another name—and it’s being met with growing resistance.
Illustration by Javier Palma
What is the green in the green transition? Between September 4 and 6, 2023, the first Africa Climate Summit was held in Nairobi, Kenya, co-hosted by the African Union. Bringing Nairobi to a standstill, this convening was choreographed as a media spectacle promising the way forward for Africa’s “green growth.” Africa, here, in tropes that built on both the colonial lens of an “exotic” continent and the related capitalist penchant for exploring “new frontiers,” was positioned as the novel geography from which a new green century would be charted.
Kenyan President William Ruto, host of the summit and chair of the Committee of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change (CAHOSCC), stated in his introductory remarks: “You have not just stepped into a conference hall; you have entered the future—a future ripe with potential, driven by global partnerships, committed to African prosperity, inclusive growth, and a livable planet for all.”
Attended by 18 African presidents, the UN secretary-general, the president of the European Union, over 30,000 delegates, and even John Kerry, this convening was certainly of importance to the who’s who of governance, climate finance, energy, and related industries. But, protests outside and the voices of the many excluded made clear that it was missing the mark. Foremost in the minds of those expressing discontent was that this meeting was, as one consultant later told me, actually “not [the] Africa Climate Summit.”
Prior to its opening, many commentators decried what was seen as a “deeply compromised agenda,” one that was dictated by the lobbying interests of external actors such as McKinsey, the World Resources Institute, and The Nature Conservancy. This allowed for a focus on, for example, carbon markets and, as Power Shift Africa decried, “notable gaps and failures that must be addressed before COP28 if we are to truly build a resilient and equitable pathway for Africa.”
The fanfare attendant to this process—lots of side events, a deal room, ministerial panels, and trite commitments—could not mask the gaping discord between what it promised and the substantive realities of those who live the increasingly difficult existences of a simultaneously heating and flooding continent.
This brings us back to the question: What is the green in the green transition? Green here—whether in references to growth or transitions—is dollar profit, rather than people-centered bids for decarbonization. The “unparalleled opportunity that climate action represents for Africa,” as stated by Ruto and cheered by the summit’s attendees, is merely a continuation of racial capitalist extraction—a further marketization of nature that thrives of the disposability of particular bodies. This vision is not new. In fact, it echoes a familiar pattern in Kenya’s postcolonial history, where successive governments have offered grand developmental slogans—Harambee, Nyayo, Vision 2030—while maintaining an economic structure fundamentally dependent on external capital and extractive logic. What is now branded as green growth is only the latest iteration of this strategy: a hollow vision that substitutes foreign validation for genuine transformation. Far from rupturing with this past, Ruto’s green agenda deepens it, offering the country’s land, labor, and ecosystems up to new markets in carbon, minerals, and conservation while cloaking this surrender in the language of sustainability and prosperity.
Furthermore, despite boasts about Africa’s dominance in renewable energy and mineral reserves, the investment in and development of fossil fuel infrastructure deepens across the continent. This is evidenced by the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, or by South Africa’s continued attachment to coal-powered electricity plants. As these contradictions are allowed to continue unabated, the green, then, becomes a profitable facade that enables both enduring and reinvented exploitations predicated on extraction.
Yet, one cannot take for granted some of the pertinent admissions of the Nairobi Declaration—the document signed by the 18 African heads of state that attended the summit. For instance, it recognizes the gravity of the climate crisis, and that Africa bears the brunt of this emergency. At the same time—in circling back to the actual green that keeps animating capitalist processes—through the foregrounding of private sector investment and the commodification of nature through carbon markets, we realize that the agenda of this (not) Africa Climate Summit, will never herald the promised African solutions for regional or global green transformations.
Instead, calls to “drive green growth and climate finance solutions for Africa and the world,” the tagline of the Africa Climate Summit, reinscribe the very political, economic, and social machinations that got us to our present status quo: that of asymmetric power relations, debt, and dependency that have contributed to and are worsening our current climate predicaments.
An unparalleled economic goldmine
“The restoration and expansion of Africa’s natural carbon sinks,” declared President Ruto at the Africa Climate Summit, “are not just an environmental imperative; they are an unparalleled economic goldmine.” This phrasing is telling. It captures how green capitalism speaks in the language of salvation but operates through the logic of extraction.
Despite the proliferation of summits, frameworks, and declarations—despite the rise of electric vehicles and the marketing of net zero—global emissions have continued to rise. The World Meteorological Organization notes that atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by over 11 percent in just two decades. In Africa, this translates into faster warming than the global average, repeated floods and droughts, and climate events of horrifying scale. Cyclone Freddy, which dropped six months of rain in six days killing nearly 1,500 people in Malawi, was the longest-lasting cyclone ever recorded. Farmers now plant into uncertainty. Soil degrades. Pests and diseases spread. Livestock perish. And in their wake: ceremonies not held, nutrition lost, spirits unhonored.
But the green transition, as pitched by African states and multilateral financiers, offers no reckoning with this loss. Instead, it markets adaptation through mechanisms like climate-smart agriculture, carbon sinks, and clean cooking—technologies often funded and monetized by global corporations. In the DRC, cobalt extraction intensifies to meet the demands of electric vehicle batteries. Walmart chases net-zero status by investing in carbon credits from African kilns and peatlands. In Zimbabwe and Namibia, artisanal miners risk their lives in the lithium rush. In Kenya’s Turkana region, wind farms arrive through land grabs. And in Morocco, solar plants compete with subsistence farmers for water.
These are not isolated failures. They are the coordinated infrastructure of green accumulation. No dollar figure can account for the losses borne on African bodies and landscapes, just as no investment pledge can disguise the fact that the transition underway is not distant from extraction but deeper into its circuitries.
Our green transition then, despite the narratives that animate the aforementioned summit and related fora, is not allowing for an improvement in socio-ecological conditions across the region. Riffing off the popular call for “loss and damages,” one cannot be blinded to the more loss and more damages portended by the current trajectory of energy transformations. The disjuncture between official climate discourse and lived experience has not gone unnoticed. In the months following the Africa Climate Summit, over a million Kenyans took to the streets to oppose the Finance Bill of 2024—a policy framed in the language of fiscal discipline and national progress, but experienced by most as yet another mechanism for elite enrichment and public dispossession. The protests, which erupted in the wake of devastating floods in Nairobi, revealed a population increasingly unwilling to bear the costs of a developmental model built on debt, austerity, and abandonment. Crucially, these manifestations offered a glimpse of what it might look like to refuse not just one bill but an entire political economy. That they unfolded less than a year after the state had styled itself as a green investment hub for foreign capital only deepened the irony. While ordinary Kenyans demanded economic justice, the government offered carbon markets. The anger in the streets was not simply about taxation—it was shaped by something even more visceral: the brutal convergence of ecological disaster and state neglect.
The deluges of 2024 were not an isolated tragedy. In March, following forecasts of unusually heavy rainfall, floods tore through 43 counties killing over 270 people, displacing nearly 50,000 households, and washing away livestock, water sources, and homes. In Nairobi, where the state had promised a green and livable future for all, entire informal settlements were submerged. It wasn’t just water that engulfed these communities—it was violence. On May 4, five-year-old Joseph Ombata was killed during an illegal state-led eviction in Mukuru Kwa Ruben, as bulldozers razed homes under the pretext of clearing riparian land. Makena Maganjo writes, “The residents of these informal settlements were given 24 hours to leave. I want to sit with that for a moment, to flesh out exactly what our venerable leaders think is possible.” This is what a climate crisis looks like in practice: not just the storm, but the state’s weaponization of it. While wealthier Nairobi neighborhoods negotiated gently with authorities, the poor were met with tear gas, live bullets, and prayers. In the wake of this devastation, the government not only failed to deliver resettlement or support, but framed the floods as “an act of God” sidestepping any responsibility for its role in urban mismanagement and environmental neglect. The Finance Bill protests that erupted soon after were not separate from this history of dispossession; they were shaped by it. Climate collapse and elite impunity are not parallel—they are entangled.
These violences are not incidental. They are the logical outcome of a development paradigm that refuses to break with the colonial scaffolding of the state, and that repackages domination in the language of opportunity. As Fadhel Kaboub argues, there can be no meaningful decarbonization without a simultaneous decolonization of the international political-economic system. While, really, this is the only hope for our children, what is proposed on stages such as the Africa Climate Summit, viewing climate change through an opportunity lens, and seeing carbon sinks and related climate-smart interventions as an “unparalleled economic gold mine,” is a far cry from a decolonized world.
While protestors on Nairobi’s streets demanded “system change,” twenty percent of Zimbabwe’s land mass, particularly its forest reserves, are now under the conservation rights of Blue Carbon General Trading, a Dubai-based firm. Zimbabwe will only receive 30 percent of the revenues emerging from the sale of carbon that animates the commodification of its territory. Similarly, roughly 10 percent of Liberia, 8 percent of Tanzania, and 10 percent of Zambia have been excised for a parallel arrangement with the same company.
The scale of these land grabs leads many to question whether it is a renewal of the Scramble for Africa, one encouraged by the 18 heads of state, who within the Nairobi Declaration:
[. . .] Emphasise that Africa possesses both the potential and the ambition to be a vital component of the global solution to climate change. As home to the world’s youngest and fastest-growing workforce, coupled with massive untapped renewable energy potential, abundant natural assets and an entrepreneurial spirit, our continent has the fundamentals to spearhead a climate compatible pathway as a thriving, cost-competitive industrial hub with the capacity to support other regions in achieving their net-zero ambitions.
The futures denied by these state sales pitches are many. Too many. And, the triumphalism intends to efface the real terrors that will continue to stalk the lives of a large majority in the region; dire realities that will not be voided even with the presence of a young demographic and entrepreneurial spirit.
As we have seen above, further exploitation of untapped renewable energy potential and natural assets, reproduces rather than ruptures oppressive conditions.
Consequently, there is no climate compatible pathway if those whose lives are enmeshed with the real green (and not just the green of dollars)—those who need the rain for crops, the cattle for kinship exchanges, and the forests for local spirits—are not able to articulate the transitions that make most sense to them.
Deep histories and wide alliances
So what is to be done? Across the Caribbean, Pacific, and Indian Ocean, small island states are already living the realities of climate collapse. When Hurricane Maria struck the Caribbean in 2017, it left over 3,000 dead in Puerto Rico, flattened homes in Dominica and St. Croix, and exposed the staggering fragility of energy, housing, and water systems. In its wake, reconstruction was delivered not through solidarity but through further financialization. One example of this: in Sint Maarten, the major post-disaster recovery plan was channeled through a World Bank grant, what Kevon Rhiney has called “a structural adjustment program in all but name.” Disaster becomes development, crisis becomes conditionality. This is not exceptional. From Barbados to Tuvalu, the Gullah Geechee corridor to the Philippines, communities are confronting rising seas, eroded land, and failing harvests. But their suffering, like Africa’s, is not simply the result of carbon emissions. It is the outcome of a global order that turns catastrophe into currency—where devastation invites investment, and the poor are asked to rebuild with the very tools that dispossessed them. Whether in Nairobi or San Juan, what gets called “resilience” too often means financialized adaptation where debt is deepened, infrastructure is privatized, and the root causes of the crisis are preserved. These are not aberrations in the system. They are the system.
Resilience, as touted by global institutions and the academic boosterism that shapes recovery discourse, lives less as a real or future condition than as a policy aesthetic. It operates as code for entrepreneurial climate governance—an alibi for abandonment that promotes what Naomi Klein has called “the shock doctrine,” now dressed in green. In this logic, the Africa Climate Summit’s promise of green growth becomes not an antidote to the crisis but a strategy to territorialize it through financialized adaptation.
If we trace the overlapping fates of communities across the globe—those subjected to unnatural disasters and then offered their own dispossession as recovery—we must ask: What would it mean to mobilize these shared histories toward a shared struggle?
The seeds are already there. When over a million Kenyans took to the streets in June and July 2024 to reject the Finance Bill, they were not only resisting an oppressive fiscal regime—they were acting in resonance with protests in Dhaka, where Bangladeshi students decried the same system of extraction in different dress. When South Africa brought a genocide case against Israel to the International Court of Justice, it was more than an act of legal diplomacy—it was a gesture toward internationalist solidarity against imperial catastrophe and ethnic cleansing. And when those excluded from the Africa Climate Summit gathered outside and declared that “climate change and its impacts are linked to our colonial past and imperialist development… driven by a logic of domination, exploitation and destruction of human beings and nature,” they were articulating precisely the systemic recognition this moment demands.
In these declarations—of refusal, of memory, of alignment—we can glimpse something like a counter-force. One that treats climate collapse not as a misfortune to be monetized, but as a confrontation with a centuries-long system of domination. One that sees the deaths in Mukuru Kwa Ruben and the destruction in Sint Maarten, the flooded homes in Nairobi and the resistance in Puerto Rico, as part of the same global pattern—and asks what must be done to break it.
Beyond recognition, we must hope that what emerges from these seeds is not simply a greener version of the present but a systemic negation of the regimes that produce more loss, more damages. These are the movements that can build a people-centered green—not as an investment portfolio, but as a practice of survival, solidarity, and repair.
