A stronger Africa is essential for the world to effectively build resilience against the impacts of climate change. The Africa we want is the Africa the World needs
The ongoing 2024 Conference of Parties (COP 29) dubbed as the "Financing COP," is convening in Baku, Azerbaijan, from 11 - 22 November 2024.
Mixed in with the diatribe about the choice of meeting location is the apprehension that the current trajectory of global warming is rapidly accelerating in the wrong direction than previously anticipated.
The latest United Nations Environment Program (UNEP)'s Emissions Gap Report 2024 reveals that global greenhouse gas emissions hit a record high in 2023, increasing by 1.3 per cent from the previous year. Without a "quantum leap" in actions, temperatures may rise well beyond the hoped-for 2 degrees Celsius, pushing the climate crisis to a new extreme.
This trajectory is devastating for African countries, already grappling with the disastrous impacts of floods, droughts, and extreme weather events, and unprepared to withstand the worsening impacts of climate change. Economically, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that for every 2 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels, Africa loses approximately 5% of its GDP.
At COP29, climate financing is at the centre of many of the discussions and proposed actions. African countries should approach these negotiations with caution, given previous unmet promises.
African nations must change course or refine their negotiation strategies moving forward.
Past COPs saw African countries committing to increasingly ambitious national climate action plans - the National Determined Contributions (NDCs). However, the financing needed to meet these NDCs, has been insufficient or entirely lacking.
Pledges like the Just Energy Transition Plan (JETP) announced during COP26 in 2021 promised $8.5 billion for South Africa to transition from coal. Looking back, only a tiny fraction, about 4% of the JETP funding has been provided as grants, the reminder was in form of concessional and non-concessional loans. These loans tend to add to the overall debt burden.
Moreover, even for the grants, only about 24% of the funding get to reach the South African institutions as the final beneficiaries. The rest of the money is disbursed through the donor country's own research institutions, banks, or agencies, who will invariably take their own cuts in administrative and other costs, further reducing the impact.
Again, even if the JETP funding was to be fully disbursed, it would still not cover the extensive infrastructure needed to phase out the existing coal plants and reconfigure South Africa's energy mix. Sometimes it may be more convenient to spend the money on feasibility studies for projects that lack implementation financing and technical capacity building on the off chance that they ever get built.
Still on financing, at COP26 wealthier nations further pushed the deadline for fulfilling their 2009 pledge of $100 billion annual climate funding, initially set for 2020, to years down the road. Still, the COP set in motion a process to establish new climate financing goals, with technical discussions taking place until the end of 2024.
COP29 is hosting negotiations on the "new collective quantified goals on climate finance" (NCQG). Africa must ensure this round of talks achieves better outcomes.
In addition to new higher pledge amounts, parties should agree on:
- Who pays for it (developed countries want to add "parties in a position to contribute")
- A thematic scope to include allocations for adaptation and loss and damage financing.
- Time frames of the financing goal.
In August 2024, the African Group of Negotiators met in Nairobi and agreed on the continent's common position for COP29. The position calls for more ambitious financing to support of Africa's NDCs, which require around $2.8 trillion between 2020 and 2030.
So far, the continent has received a pittance compared to what it needs, and having an empty promise of a higher ambition may not change much.
African negotiators must therefore push for clearer rules on climate finance. In the absence of clear accounting rules of what constitutes climate finance, many of the wealthier countries are using different methodologies and categorizing even regular loans or foreign aid as climate finance.
On expectations from COP29, Africa must be realistic and learn from the past, whether from the high hopes on carbon markets, where details are still being negotiated, or from the minimal funding provided to the Loss and Damage fund, which has only received $10 million of the $680 million pledged.
Changing negotiation strategy
At COP29, African countries should shift their negotiation strategies. They must turn to collective bargain and leverage the continent's vast resources - agriculture, minerals, forests, and marine assets - as a bargaining chip for tangible development and climate action.
For example, critical minerals--including lithium, cobalt, aluminum, and platinum--are essential for global energy transition and hence lowering the global carbon footprint. Africa has large reserves of these minerals, and demand for them is projected to surge sixfold by 2040 - 40 times higher for lithium and 20 times higher for cobalt.
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However, Africa's capacity to capitalize on these resources will require collectively investing in a continental energy and transport infrastructure that supports manufacturing and value addition and move away from the "pit to port" extractive model.
Similarly, Africa needs to invest in its most significant asset: its people. While many African countries have developed and rolled out programmes to educate their citizens on climate change, their levels of vulnerability could be exacerbated if these strategies are not combined with other long-term planning in crucial sectors such as energy, food systems, and urban planning.
At the UN Office of the Special Advisor on Africa (OSAA), we say, "The Africa we want is the Africa the World needs." African countries should enter COP29 negotiations on these terms and push for recognition that a stronger Africa has far-reaching implications on whether the world pivots in time to build resilience to impacts of climate change.
Ms. Bitsat Yohannes is a Programme Management Officer and cluster lead for Energy and Climate at the UN Office of the Special Adviser on Africa (OSAA).
