The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) latest report on global warming clearly shows that human influence is responsible for warming the atmosphere. In today’s conversation, Africa Climate Conversations ask Dr. Mouhamadou Bamba Sylla, the AIMS-Canada Research Chair in Climate Change Science at the African Institute for Mathematical Sciences Rwanda, if the pledges made at the just concluded 26th UN summit on climate change (COP26) in Glasgow lead to reduced warming.

One hundred four countries, among them the United States of America and the European Union, pledged to cut their methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Africa is pushing to exploit its natural gas as a baseload to catalyze uptake of renewable energy. Bamba Sylla, an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group 1 lead author, also expounds on why methane emissions are critical if the world is to stay within the Paris agreement temperatures goals? At Glasgow, the scientific community said that the largest emitters must reduce their emissions by a factor of 30, and the developing nations can increase their emission by factor three for the world to stay within the global carbon budget in a fairway. Can Africa eat fairly, meet its development agenda without emitting too many emissions into the atmosphere.