Editorial

We need climate change science to help tell the stories of African cities

Debra Roberts

Received: 06 Dec. 2024; Accepted: 10 Dec. 2024; Published: 28 Mar. 2025

Copyright: © 2025. The Author(s). Licensee: AOSIS.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

So why is an urban practitioner writing an editorial for the African Journal of Climate Studies?

Climate has always determined where we locate, build and live in our cities. For example, 6000 to 7000 years ago, Mesopotamia’s climate was wetter than that part of the Middle East is today, a critical factor contributing to the emergence of the world’s first cities such as Uruk and Eridu (Kiger, 2024). Today the impacts of human-induced climate change influence development opportunities and challenges in cities from Iqaluit to Kinshasa. In Africa, 70% of the continent’s cities are highly vulnerable to climate shocks (Trisos et al., 2022), particularly the small and medium-sized urban areas. The recent deadly floods in cities such as Durban and Nairobi and multiyear droughts in Bulawayo and Cape Town are all stark reminders of the extent to which climate change influences urban development aspirations and challenges – from securing sustainable water and food supplies, addressing energy poverty, reducing risks from heatwaves and floods, protecting biodiversity, to addressing infrastructural gaps and needs. Knowledge about the past, present and future climates of our continent is key to understanding how we secure a more sustainable, equitable and just development path for all of Africa’s cities. Climate science is no longer the sole purview of paleoclimatologists or integrated assessment modelers – it is now a vital tool in the toolbox of every urban practitioner. But it is a tool that is not always easily available to the people who need it most.

In a world where we increasingly speak about open science, scientific information is often locked away behind expensive pay walls or doesn’t exist because of data gaps. I can’t count the number of times I have looked at a global biodiversity or climate change map and seen the African continent left largely blank because of actual and perceived knowledge gaps. That is why it is so important to have a journal such as the African Journal of Climate Studies (AJOCS) focus on climate issues in Africa. It provides a critical resource that can inform local thinking and action, and input into global scientific assessments such as those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). These assessments are important because they influence international climate policy and financing.

By providing a voice for African climate science, journals such as AJOCS also help to address the deep imbalances in the global scientific project. With 1.5 billion people, Africa currently has 18.3% of the world’s population (worldometer, n.d.) and yet during the sixth assessment cycle of the IPCC (2015–2023) only 11% of the authors were from Africa. While this is a marked improvement from the 8% of the fifth assessment cycle – it is an indication of the imbalance that remains in the world of climate science. The explanation for this imbalance lies in the history of science itself and the path dependencies it has created. In a recent feature in Science (Culotta et al., 2024), the colonial legacy of science is examined, and it is concluded that the ‘scientific enterprise both fuelled, and was fuelled by, the colonial one’. This finding is not surprising given that over the last 500 years eight European countries have been responsible for colonising 68% of the world’s countries (Culotta et al., 2024). We still see the fingerprint of colonialism in science as the most cited scientists still disproportionately work in former colonising nations or in former colonies such as the United States (US). Only 10% of the ‘Top Scientists’ work in the Global South (Culotta et al., 2024) even though 88% of the world’s population (some 7.2 billion people) live in what is increasingly known as the Majority World. This deep structural inequality has consequences for the funding of science. For example, in the IPCC’s sixth assessment cycle, Working Group II (the working group responsible for assessing impacts, adaptation and vulnerability to climate change) found that: ‘From 1990–2019, research on Africa received just 3.8% of climate-related research funding globally: 78% of this funding for Africa went to EU and north American institutions and only 14.5% to African institutions’ (Trisos et al., 2022). This means that since 1990, only 1% of research funding for climate change globally has gone to African researchers.

Working Group II also found that in Africa ‘The number of climate research publications with locally based authors are among the lowest globally and research led by external researchers may focus less on local priorities’ (Trisos et al., 2022). This is a result of researchers from the Global North undertaking research in the former colonies in the Global South ‘with little involvement by local scientists and little credit to their work or intellectual property’ (Trisos et al., 2022). This process is the very anthesis of open science and results in people not being acknowledged or being excluded from telling their own stories and frankly is not dissimilar to the extractive plantation or mine-to-port philosophy of past colonial times and the current neo-colonial infrastructure development taking place on the African continent. We clearly still have a long way to go in decolonising science, eliminating structural inequalities and ensuring open science that can meet the needs of urban practitioners on the African continent.

The good news is that scientists in the Global South are mobilising and beginning to shift the axis of scientific influence away from the Global North by taking control of the narrative and using local resources to tell their own stories. This is particularly important given the opportunity provided by the IPCC’s upcoming Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, which could ensure a more balanced assessment of the challenges and opportunities posed by climate change for the world’s urban areas. As the fastest urbanising continent in the world, it is critical that Africa’s cities feature strongly in the assessment. Usefully the recently approved outline of the Special Report includes many issues of relevance to African cities such as informality, equity, justice, infrastructure, health, waste management, finance and loss and damage. But addressing these issues is only possible if sufficient climate data and information are available for urban areas in Africa as the IPCC does not do its own research but relies mainly on what is available in the peer-reviewed literature. Many journal special issues are being planned in advance of the Special Report on Cities – perhaps AJOCS could consider something similar? In this way, AJOCS could help tell the story of the relationship between Africa’s cities and the continent’s climate: past, present and future. Especially important are transdisciplinary papers co-produced by scientists and practitioners that use climate science to identify issues of policy relevance and opportunities for inclusive and sustainable action that leave no one, no place nor no ecosystem behind. This is especially critical given the lacklustre outcomes of 29th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP29) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change held in Baku, Azerbaijan and a range of recent populist election results which make a united and ambitious global climate change response more difficult to achieve. There is thus an urgent and growing need for local level action that ensures that urban areas remain at the forefront of innovative global climate action.

With their unique ability to lead by example, the challenge is clear; the time is now to help tell and influence the story of our cities and our climate – especially in Africa.

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