Eleventh International Conference on Climate Change: Impacts & Responses

Abstract

Africa is arguably the least contributing region to carbon emissions, the major trigger of climate change but the continent’s unique status as home to many of the world’s poorest people’s means that much needs to be done in order to respond to the climate change challenge thrown at humanity. Africa is at great risk of climate change. Indeed, the World Economic and Social Survey (2016) classified the bulk of the African continent as being at the risk of climate change when compared with the rest of the world. Arising from the above is the poor climate change finance in the continent especially by subnational political entities. In fact, in both Nigeria and South Africa climate finance has not been commensurate with the threat or the changes posed with a growing reality of climate change. Weak climate change response comes with human security threat which has been categorized in seven key areas of human needs, that is, economic, food, health, environmental, personal, community and political (Hossain and Adams, 2017). The paper will adopt Structural functionalism and the theory of environmental governance to ascertain the financial issues, institutional viability and to determine the ways political structure, inhibit viable subnational climate change response of Lagos and Cape Town in Nigeria and South Africa respectively.