A promise of socio-economic development from the East African Crude Oil has turned sour before the project has even reached financial close; possibly paving the way for what communities and ecosystems surrounding the pipeline are to expect - a trail of destruction and environmental degradation.

Activist Nonhle Mbuthuma vows that climate activists and civil society will continue opposing Shell’s bid to extract oil and gas off the shore of the Wild Coast as Shell pursues its seismic exploration ambitions off pristine coast.

The Okavango Delta, a pristine African wetland and a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is under threat from oil exploration, which has begun with little regard for the concerns of local communities. In an interview with CJC, Corinna van Wyk of the Legal Assistance Centre of Namibia reveals ReconAfrica's disregard for transparent procedures, raising serious questions about conservation and governance in the region.

The repeated underwhelming results of successive Conference of the Parties (COP) have left many people in the Global South wondering if there is still a point to these gatherings. Civil society networks feel that the corporate capture of the event is in fact complete and total, and countering that hegemony to allow for real change may eventually mean ditching the COP for more radical alternative spaces. We spoke to Aïssatou Keita, an activist from Senegal about this subject.

From samples of an organism that grows to just over two millimeters in length, zooplankton scientists in Namibia have, over two decades, collected evidence which confirms that waters within this part of the southeast Atlantic Ocean had been warming since the 2000s. Yokany Oliveira spoke to a local zooplankton scientist about these microscopic organisms and the breakthrough research on ocean warming.

Between October 31 and November 12 2021, world leaders, civil society and climate activists met in Glasgow, Scotland for the 2021 United Nations Conference of the Parties Conference, more commonly referred to as COP26. Mercy Malikwa recently caught up with Julius Ng’oma, National Coordinator for Civil Society Network for Climate Change in Malawi, to get his take on the much-hyped conference.

Dorah Marema has been working on climate issues for decades. She started one of the first grassroots environmental movements in South Africa and today, she advises local government authorities on how to adopt climate-smart policies. She believes that Africa in general and South Africa in particular need to be doing more right now, including in international negotiation processes like the Conference of the Parties, in order to mitigate and adapt to the adverse effects of climate change.

Dr. Victor Munnik is an associate researcher at the South African-based environmental justice NGO “Groundwork“. He has worked on their reports, covering coal issues and South Africa’s greenhouse gases emission hotspot, Mpumalanga. As a political ecologist, Dr. Munnik specialises in water quality. The researcher and academic also collaborates with the Water Research Commission, mostly on civil society issues. He works directly with activists and communities, many of them in Mpumalanga Highveld.

Ashok Subron is a political and social work activist from Mauritius and the President of the Centre for Alternative Research Studies. Subron was recently part of a group of local Mauritian activists who volunteered to clean up the Mauritian coastal area affected by the MV Wakashio oil spill in July 2020.

On Tuesday, 16th March 2021, Vishwas Satgar, Professor for International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa who is also co-founder of the South African Food Sovereignty Campaign, delivered a lecture on climate justice as well as his climate activism work in South Africa to participants of the Young African Journalists’ Accelerator Program 2021/22 Cycle. Here are the excerpts.

James Goodman is a Professor in Social and Political Sciences at the University of Technology Sydney (UTS). In 2017 he initiated the Climate Justice Research Centre which focuses on the socio-political drivers for climate justice and define a new research agenda on the centrality of justice concerns for climate action. In this interview, he talks about his career in focusing on climate justice and what he thinks it will need to enable an energy transition in Africa.

Adenike Oladosu, Nigerian climate activist, eco-feminist and eco-reporter, was initially thrust into the world of climate activism after witnessing first-hand how climate change induced shocks negatively impacted the lives of the communities of the Lake Chad region. Lerato Mutsila and Sharon Munjenjema spoke to Adenike Oladuso about her work and her views on the climate justice agenda in Africa.