As a researcher interested in colonial histories and their impacts on present-day development, I recently explored aspects of these legacies through a comparative analysis of Senegal and Ghana, based on previous archival research.
In the paper I explore connections between key colonial export crops and the everyday forms of climate vulnerability experienced in the two countries. I show how forms of exploitation that emerged in the context of colonial capitalism are linked to the form and uneven distribution of climate hazards in the present. These histories have profoundly shaped how people are exposed to record-high temperatures and unpredictable rainfall patterns.
There is growing recognition that the breakdown of the global climate, and vulnerability to its effects, are deeply rooted in histories of colonialism. This recognition has even made its way into official policy circles. The 2022 Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change, the UN’s climate science arm), for instance, acknowledges that vulnerability to climate change is “often made more complex by past developments, such as histories of colonialism.”
My research adds to this picture by starting to show just how complex and embedded these impacts are.
Uneven distribution
The people who are most at risk from the climate crisis are often those who’ve done the least to create it. As a region, Africa contributes about 4% of global CO₂ emissions. Indeed, some estimates show that only in the last decade has Africa collectively emitted more carbon than it stores in various ecosystems.
According to the World Meteorological Organisation, temperatures in Africa are increasing faster than the global average. Recent estimates suggest that losses due to heat alone amounted to 8% of GDP in much of Africa between 1992 and 2013.
Colonial powers extracted wealth in the trillions from colonised peoples and territories. They have continued to do so after the formal end of colonial rule. Rich countries have burned well more than their fair share of fossil fuels in the process.
This has meant that colonised countries, left with underdeveloped infrastructures and impoverished citizens, have less capacity to withstand and respond to increasingly severe weather.
But the connections between colonialism and climate vulnerability don’t end with these big picture measures of money and carbon emissions.
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The damage done by colonial-era economic models
In my paper, I show how the specific everyday ways that people are exposed to climate hazards in formerly colonised countries also have a lot to do with the way that colonial economies were organised.
Colonial economies in Senegal and Ghana were dominated by French and English merchant companies. These merchants dramatically reshaped economies, especially in the last decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth.
Among the strategies British and French merchants used was to take control of the trade in commodities – peanuts in Senegal, cocoa from Ghana – through chains of debts. Working through complex networks of brokers and traders, colonial merchants advanced agricultural inputs and survival goods to farmers against expected crops.
This system largely protected European businesses from the risks inherent in farming, such as bad weather and pests.
The system also meant that local farmers incurred higher and higher levels of debt. Where people needed to borrow money or goods in order to plant crops and survive the wait until harvest, this tended to lock farmers into producing the same crops for export year after year.
In both countries, this meant that farmers’ productivity tended to fall over time because of problems with pests and soil depletion. Often, the only response available to farmers, who in many instances had already sold their crops in advance, was to plant more intensely.
In turn, this deepened both indebtedness and vulnerability to ecological hazards. Indebted farmers were more exposed to crop failures and farm yields were often eroded, and they needed to spend more and more on inputs. Intensified planting also sped up soil erosion and the spread of pests.
The colonial system also limited investments that might have improved productivity or provided greater protection against climate hazards. In Senegal, for instance, colonial peanut cultivation mainly relied on rainfall for water. Officials from the colonial government baulked at proposals to build irrigation systems, and merchant firms not directly involved in cultivation had little incentive to invest either.
Postcolonial economies have changed in significant respects, but important elements of the merchant system from the colonial era have nonetheless remained in place. Major export crops in both countries continue to be cultivated by many small producers, and many people’s livelihoods remain heavily reliant on cash crops.
Most importantly, the form of climate vulnerability closely mirrors the hazards that emerged in the colonial era. The unpredictable availability of water, for instance, remains one of the most pressing forms of climate vulnerability in peanut growing regions. This is particularly the case in Senegal as peanut cultivation remains overwhelmingly reliant on rainfall for water. The result, as one study has shown, is that levels of poverty in peanut growing regions remain very closely correlated with rainfall levels.
Next steps
The story doesn’t look the same everywhere. One of the legacies of colonialism is that it created new patterns of uneven and unequal development within as well as between colonies. In places like Kenya and South Africa colonisation entailed European settlement. African people and communities were displaced to make way for plantations and mines. Struggles over access to water, to name one example, remain strongly shaped by these histories.
The point is that the imprint of colonialism on the climate crisis is far-reaching and complex. Colonialism didn’t just extract wealth and resources. It profoundly transformed societies, economies, and the ways that people relate to the natural world.
This means that the climate debts that rich countries owe the rest of the world go beyond just the value of wealth that’s been extracted or the volume of carbon emitted. They’re probably incalculable and unpayable.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
