The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam in Benishangul-Gumuz, Ethiopia/ Abiy Ahmed Ali/Prime Minister of Ethiopia/Facebook
The Africa Climate Summit is a greenwashing front for a new wave of colonialism. Under the guise of "nature-based solutions," corporations like the Gates Foundation are pushing schemes that will turn the continent into a carbon sink for the world's worst polluters.
“Africa exists as three things and three things only for the Western colonizers… everything they want(ed), everything they need(ed), and everything they don’t want to pay for.” - Dr. Muhammad Samura
Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Ethiopia may be impoverished financially, but is irrefutably one of the wealthiest nations I’ve ever been to as it pertains to culture, heritage, and national pride. Addis Ababa is a proper city that is clearly rising with new construction everywhere from housing, to hotels, and infrastructure that includes the largest hydroelectric dam on the continent, which began operations on September 9, 2025. To this end, the vibrant city with its gregarious and affable residents was more than an appropriate location to host the second bi-annual Africa Climate Summit (ACS2). This is especially true as ACS2 was held at a time when Ethiopia is celebrating its national New Year Holiday and the opening of its new, aforementioned, hydroelectric dam, the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), which Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed hailed as, “the greatest achievement in the history of the Black race.”
But while ACS2 was billed as a menagerie of hope and promise, it also revealed a specter of a new phase of neocolonialism on the continent . . . a specter that could very well bleed Africa dry of its abundant natural resources and its very culture that is on the brink of being captured by technocratic behemoths and false climate change solutions. These forces could render the continent into the face of greenwashing scams with the potential to vindicate the notion that now that slaves are no longer taken from Africa via chattel slavery, a new form of bondage, which some refer to as “climate colonialism” will instead be brought to Africa in ways that will pillage its agency and self-determination and unleash a contemporary tragedy of the commons.
According to African Union Commission Chair, His Excellency (HE) Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, “[ACS2] marks a decisive moment for Africa to unite in pursuit of climate justice, resilient development, and a sustainable future for generations to come - directly advancing our continental blueprint, Agenda 2063: ‘The Africa We Want’ and further “demonstrate Africa's technological solutions, where ecology and nature-based solutions drive the economy, and resilience becomes [its] legacy.” Additionally, the summit also is meant to establish a unified African agenda for the upcoming global climate conference, COP 30, that will be held in Belem, Brazil later this year.
Heralding “nature based solutions” in itself is seen by many in the global climate and environmental justice community as problematic. According to the informational document Hoodwinked in the Hothouse developed by a coalition of organizations including Climate Justice Alliance, Just Transition Alliance, Indigenous Environmental Network, and others, nature based solutions, typically in the form of carbon pricing, “assign a monetary value to greenhouse gas pollution mask the fact that carbon pricing allows fossil fuel extraction to continue unabated under the false assumption that market forces will drive significant emissions reductions.”
And other groups like the World Rainforest Movement assert, “What corporations and big conservation groups call "nature-based solutions" is a dangerous distraction. Their marketing concept is dressed up with unproven and flawed data and the claim that the idea can provide 37 percent of reductions in CO2 by 2030.” They continue, “Nature-based solutions are thus not a solution, they are a scam. The purported solutions will result in “nature-based dispossessions” because they will enclose the remaining living spaces of Indigenous Peoples, peasants and other forest-dependent communities and reduce “nature” to a service provider for offsetting corporations’ pollution and to protect the profits of those corporations most responsible for climate chaos.”
So the question becomes, who is behind the push to turn the African continent into a corporate carbon sink of green capitalism that will not only allow the largest polluters in the world to continue their profit model of extract and emit fossil fuels but also partner with African leaders including African Union Chair Yousoff to push these “false solutions” and inculcate Africa’s young population who are forecasted to produce more people entering the workforce each year by 2035 than the rest of the world combined? A quick review of the ACS2 website reveals that one of its “Title Sponsors” is none other than the Gates Foundation who have had a profound presence on the continent for decades.
The Gates Foundation’s flagship African program, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) has been the subject of sharp rebukes for failing to accomplish its purported “green revolution” on the continent that was supposed to improve health and reduce poverty, but in fact engendering more problems including, but not limited to, “growing pesticide use, environmental degradation, worsening soil quality, reduced diversity of food crops, hooking farmers in a debt cycle with expensive inputs, and increased corporate control over food systems.” It should be noted that the Gates Foundation’s “green revolution” also includes a concept known as “climate smart agriculture” that climate and environmental justice groups such as the global agroecological alliance, La Via Campesina deem a false solution.
Yet for all the damage distributed by the Gates Foundation, a new entity has keen interest in the continent - one of the most resource extractive industries in the world, crypto-mining. The Microsoft Corporation, which is the driving revenue source for the Gates Foundation have two key things in common with crypto-mining corporations - a heavy interest in driving the AI market and an associated need for governments willing to hand over its natural resources in the form of energy and water to allow for cryptomining and AI to operate in exchange for short-term payouts. In fact, the major beneficiaries of the new Gerd dam that just opened in Ethiopia will be miners of cryptocurrencies whose data centers are projected to command approximately 66% of the nation’s electricity in 2025.
The only thing more profound than Africans at ACS2 was the number of panels discussing AI’s future on the continent. One of the panels I attended centered the use of AI for enhancing agriculture and energy use on the continent. When questions were raised about the massive amount of energy and water required to operate AI data centers, the panelists all seemed to agree that Africa’s “abundant energy and natural resources” would be up to task to accommodate.
So-called climate finance through carbon markets for nature based solutions and rolling out the red carpet to Big Tech will very likely open a portal to long-term neocolonialism that would put the entire continent under the green thumbs of green capitalists and their greenwashing schemes. And the U.S. Africa Command’s (AFRICOM) growing presence on the continent could very well become the vehicle to act as a vanguard for the resource needs of U.S-based and other multi-national corporations, which we have seen in other regions of the world, most notably the Middle East. If climate “solutions” are nothing more than mechanisms for neocolonialism and the pillage of self-determination and agency it becomes clearer that world leaders, neoliberal think tanks and neoliberal “environmental” organizations such as Conservation International and the World Wildlife Fund do not view climate change first and foremost as an issue central to establishing and maintaining people(s) centered human rights.
This has massive implications for Africa’s most essential natural resource, its young people. Next week we will take a closer look at how many of the young people who attended ACS2 are navigating the need for climate finance to implement their local projects while also pushing back against Western paternalism and demanding more self determination and agency of their own on the continent and the world over ahead of COP 30.
Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright is an international climate and environmental liberation advocate, a racial justice practitioner, and a writer and policy expert residing in the United States with his family and their mischievous cat, “Evil” Ernie. He is a proud and active member of the Black Alliance for Peace and the Movement for Black Lives. His radio program, “Full Spectrum with Anthony Rogers-Wright,” airs on the Mighty WPFW network every Tuesday at 6:00 PM EST.
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