On the eve of the UN Climate Change Conference this December, ‘momentum for action falls far short of that needed to avert catastrophe’, William Minter and Anita Wheeler write in this week’s Pambazuka News. When it comes to Africa's natural resources, say Minter and Wheeler, the ‘prospects for change depend squarely on African governments, on foreign companies and their home-country governments, and on the pressures that can be mobilised by national and international civil society’. With Africa predicted to ‘suffer consequences out of all proportion to its contribution to global warming, which is primarily caused by greenhouse gas emissions from wealthy countries’, African governments ‘can and should take action now’.