When the ground splits and the sea rises

Beneath northern Ethiopia, the African continent is slowly tearing itself apart. In the Afar Depression, tectonic plates drift away from one another, driven by forces deep within the Earth. Scientists have measured this movement with precision. It is slow, inevitable, and entirely unrelated to climate change. It is geology, unfolding on a timescale far beyond politics.

Along the coastlines of Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania, however, another transformation is underway—one that is neither slow nor inevitable. The sea is rising fast enough to erase land, contaminate freshwater, and displace communities within a single generation. This process is not geological. It is political. It is the cumulative result of an economic model that has allowed a small group of countries to emit freely while outsourcing the consequences to others.

Here lies the central injustice: the countries in East Africa that are being hit first and hardest by climate change are also among those that have contributed least to causing it. The entire African continent accounts for less than five percent of global CO₂ emissions, and many East African countries emit a fraction of the global per-capita average. Somalia’s emissions are almost negligible in global terms. Yet its coastline is retreating, its water sources are turning saline, and its people are being forced to adapt to a crisis they did not create.

This is not an unfortunate coincidence. It is the predictable outcome of a global climate architecture built on inequality.

Global climate policy continues to celebrate mitigation achievements in wealthy economies while treating adaptation in the Global South as a secondary concern. Trillions are mobilized for green transitions in the North, while frontline regions are offered loans, pilot projects, and resilience rhetoric. Much of what is labeled “climate finance” for Africa arrives as debt, deepening fiscal pressure on states already struggling with repayment. Adaptation is framed as an investment opportunity rather than a matter of justice.

International financial institutions play a decisive role in sustaining this imbalance. The World Bank and the IMF acknowledge climate risk in principle, yet in practice maintain debt frameworks that limit countries’ ability to respond. African governments are told to plan for rising seas and extreme weather while being constrained by austerity conditions that hollow out understanding, infrastructure, and public services. This is not climate leadership. It is climate displacement by design.

The result is a dangerous delay. Slow-onset disasters such as sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and soil salinization rarely trigger emergency responses until livelihoods have already collapsed. By the time the international system reacts, displacement has occurred and the cost of intervention has multiplied. East Africa is already living this failure in real time.

What makes this especially troubling is that the narrative of African vulnerability persists, obscuring both responsibility and agency. Africa is portrayed as perpetually at risk, rarely as a source of knowledge. Yet across East Africa, communities are restoring mangroves, rethinking water management, and adapting agriculture to new climate realities—often without meaningful international support. These efforts are dismissed as “local” while large-scale, externally designed solutions dominate funding pipelines.

The continental rift beneath Ethiopia reminds us that not all change can be governed. Some processes unfold beyond human control. Climate change is not one of them. The pace and severity of its impacts are shaped by decisions about energy, finance, debt, and development—decisions still largely made outside the regions most affected.

The real scandal is not that East Africa is changing. It is that the global climate system continues to operate as if those changes were marginal, distant, or acceptable collateral damage. Countries that polluted least are expected to adapt fastest. Countries that benefited most from fossil-fuel growth dictate the terms of transition.

East Africa is not a warning about the future. It is a verdict on the present. It shows what happens when responsibility is decoupled from impact, when justice is postponed in the name of pragmatism, and when global governance mistakes inequality for inevitability.

The ground will continue to split beneath Africa. That process is indifferent to human action. Whether the sea continues to rise at its current pace is not. That is a political choice. And the cost of that choice is already being paid—by those who did the least to incur it.