Environmental issues once featured prominently on the China-Africa agenda, where leaders on both sides focused on the wildlife trade, conservation, and a wide range of sustainability issues. Not anymore.
Today, it’s all about access to COVID-19 vaccines, trade, and the U.S.-China face-off. African leaders, for their part, are not prioritizing critical environmental issues in talks with their Chinese counterparts. And, once again, it looks like sustainability will not be a key focus of the upcoming Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) Summit, which is scheduled to take place in Senegal later this year.
That’s too bad, because there’s a lot to discuss. Two journalists, Zhang Zhizhu, a freelance environmental reporter in Beijing, and Terna Gyuse, a Cape Town–based contributing editor for the environmental news site Mongabay, join Eric and Cobus to discuss the top China-Africa environmental stories, and why they feel these issues should be on the FOCAC agenda.
