Peter
Schwartzstein

Europe’s climate transition is reshaping trade, security, and geopolitical relations beyond the EU’s borders. Nowhere are the stakes higher than in Europe’s relationship with Africa, where EU climate policies directly affect everything from livelihoods to resource governance. Set in 2035, these contrasting scenarios illustrate how Europe’s choices today could either deepen climate cooperation between the two continents or doom them to conflict tomorrow.

Scenario 1: The Domino Effect

Fuelled by securitised and unilaterally applied policies, Europe and Africa leapt from one misunderstanding to another. In trying political and economic circumstances, events took on a logic of their own and soon mushroomed into a full-blown rupture that served no one’s interests.

It’s 2035. Most of the EU’s landmark climate programming has been in place for the best part of a decade. Relations with Africa have never been worse. Furious with what they see
as opportunistic policies designed to climate-proof Europe at others’ expense, many African leaders are no longer on speaking terms with their European counterparts. As warming surges past 2.2°C, it has given rise to a series of cascading political events that threaten to leave everyone poorer, weaker, and, in their fragmentation even more exposed to the very climate impacts these actions were supposed to temper.

The difficulty began in 2029 when, after repeated delays, several key pieces of climate legislation were implemented almost at once. The Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism
(CBAM), which had previously been watered down under international pressure, was actually beefed up to remove all exemptions shortly before it came into force. It was unfair, German car manufacturers had insisted, that Chinese brands were held to less exacting standards, even as they’d come to consume over 60% of the European Electric Vehicle (EV) market. Although some EU and European government officials worried about what this uncompromising approach to CBAM might mean for Africa, they felt powerless to resist the clamour for more strategic autonomy, and a ‘more competitive Europe’, even if doing so undermined international partnerships.

EU officials were right to worry about the fragility of nascent industries in Africa. Many of these enterprises operated with such wafer-thin margins and Europe-focused export markets, that they soon collapsed. The subsequent uptick in trans-Mediterranean migration threw EU politics into an even more vicious tailspin.

(Read more on the ECDPM/Nexus website)