‘Clean up the mess you are making,’ rich nations told

Nick Ferris hears from African nations at Cop30 about the help desperately needed to fight the climate crisis. But after a year of aid cuts, there are few signs of anyone stepping up

- Nick Ferris

Year after year, the small, densely forested west African nation of Liberia is facing ever more extreme impacts of the climate crisis, including floods and droughts that wreak havoc for farmers and coastal erosion driven by rising sea levels.

“In May this year, I stood under a coconut tree by the sea in the city of Greenville, to mark the groundbreaking of a new coastal protection scheme,” says Emmanuel Yarkpawolo, executive director of Liberia’s Environmental Protection Agency. “When I returned to the same spot in September, just a few months later, the coconut tree was gone because of the coastal erosion we are seeing. That’s how bad things are in our country.”

The Independent met Yarkpawolo at Liberia’s modest country pavilion at the UN climate conference Cop30, where he was taking a break from his work as the country’s chief negotiator. Indeed, the Liberia pavilion - which was funded with help from the UN Development Programme - was filled with delegates from several other west African nations, with many unable to afford their own national base. It was a marked contrast to the vast, multi-roomed national hubs of many Western or oil-rich nations.

The wealth of a country makes no difference to its standing at the official Cop30 negotiations, however, where all 198 parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change are given equal status. “It’s why least developed countries are so committed to the UN system here, because it’s the only space that really gives them a voice,” explains Mohamed Adow, from the Nairobi-based think tank Power Shift Africa. “The US or UK can cut aid without any consultation with the recipient country - but these countries will keep coming here in good faith, hoping that the rest of the world will start to notice what is happening to them.”