Africa not waiting for help on environment

By Gregory Simpkins

The Conference of the Parties (COP) is the decision-making body of the United Nations effort to combat climate change. It has met every year since March 1995, and COP 28 is scheduled to take place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in November. However, all the promises made over the past nearly three decades have not significantly mitigated the climate risks for African countries.

Quartz Africa Weekly has catalogued numerous climate-related natural disaster just in the last year. For example, floods in Nigeria left more than 600 people dead and displaced 1.3 million from their homes last October, while Cyclone Ana in Malawi displaced 190,429 people in January. At least 453 people died as a result of flooding in South Africa in April, while hundreds perished due to devastating tropical storms in Madagascar and Mozambique in the same month. This year alone, climate change has caused one of the worst droughts in history in the Horn of Africa.

If nothing is done, Africa’s economic growth will be stunted by climate shocks, creating a poverty trap for millions of citizens.

If nothing is done, Africa’s economic growth will be stunted by climate shocks, creating a poverty trap for millions of citizens who will be on the widest section of the “highway to climate hell” – a phrase popularized by UN Secretary-General António Guterres.

Countries such as Sudan, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad face a reduction in gross domestic product (GDP) of more than 80 percent by 2100 if no significant climate mitigation is achieved by then.

According to a UN Adaptation Gap report published last November, international adaptation finance flows to developing countries are five to ten times below estimated needs. The report estimated annual adaptation needs are US$160-340 billion by 2030 and US$315-565 billion by 2050.

Despite the repeated calls for developing countries such as those in Africa to make a more rapid transition to clean energy to mitigate climate change, according to Mari Pangestu, a former World Bank official, developing nations actually will need more than US$1 trillion each year to make significant progress in climate transition.

“The estimate is like US$1 trillion to US$3 trillion a year for developing countries to be able to transition,” she told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Asia”.

Reuters reported that the Group of 20 major nations failed at their meeting in late July to agree on concrete targets to cut dangerous emissions, releasing only a statement that dismissed current measures to address climate change as “insufficient”.

The impasse – the latest in a string of inconclusive international conferences – came days after scientists again raised the alarm, Reuters reported, saying human-induced climate change has played an “absolutely overwhelming” role in the extreme heatwaves that swept across North America, Europe and China. But to make the energy transition being demanded, there must be adequate resources to do so.

“This debate is going to continue unless developed countries can see that this is about development and climate – not just about climate,” said Pangestu, a former trade and tourism minister for Indonesia. “And that has been the source of tension. You can’t separate the two,” she added, underlining the “key word” is actually – transition.

This summer, African leaders attending the inaugural Africa Climate Summit held in Nairobi, Kenya, stressed the importance of decarbonizing the global economy for equality and shared prosperity and urged investment to promote the sustainable use of Africa’s natural assets for the continent’s transition to low carbon development and contribution to global decarbonization.

Taking matters into their own hands

Developed world promises have not produced the financing required for the kind of transition being called for so African are increasingly unwilling to wait for promises on environmental assistance to be provided for them. Last November, the Chief Executive Officers and Chairpersons of 55 African companies, from a diverse range of sectors, representing more than US$150 billion in revenue and more than 900,000 employees across 50 African countries, supported by the UN Global Compact, gathered at COP 27. They took the opportunity to introduce the Africa Business Leaders Coalition (ABLC) to the world, whose vision, they said, is to bring the perspectives of African business leaders, and their ecosystems, into the global conversation to bring actively and meaningfully to bear the private sector perspective and engagement on the continent’s most pressing issues.

Although Africa has contributed the least to creating the climate crisis, its people, its ecosystems, its economies, and its cultural heritage are among the most vulnerable and least prepared to adapt – largely due to insufficient support from international partners.

“We hear the alarming warnings of the scientific community and understand that although Africa has contributed the least to creating the climate crisis, its people, its ecosystems, its economies, and its cultural heritage are among the most vulnerable and least prepared to adapt – largely due to insufficient support from international partners,” ABLC said in a statement. “Climate action is integral to addressing key issues facing Africa, such as food insecurity, forced displacement, water scarcity, and new diseases, all being exacerbated by climate impacts.”

The business leaders acknowledged the need for partnerships to accomplish real change on the energy transition and asked the UN Global Compact to act as a convener and channel to the broader UN system.

“We call for a comprehensive and systemic response to the incipient debt crisis outside default frameworks to create the fiscal space that all developing countries need to finance development and climate action,” African leaders said in the Nairobi Declaration on Climate Change and Call to Action, adopted at the conclusion of the Africa Climate Summit.

At the conference, African leaders expressed skepticism that help from the developed world will be forthcoming. Namibian President Hage Geingob said he believes rich countries don’t care about climate and felt that the West has not pledged enough to save Africa’s future generations. He called for the “scaling up of the levels of climate finance, through providing concrete long term targets for climate finance pathways and accounting methodologies for the collective goal by developed countries to reach US$100 billion a year from 2025 and beyond.”

Meanwhile. Kenyan President William Ruto criticized the West for “skirting around issues and delay tactics” in financing climate adaptation in Africa and asked developed economies to compensate the continent “no later than 2024”.

“We note that multilateral finance reform is necessary but not sufficient to provide the scale of climate financing the world needs to achieve 45 percent emission reduction required to meet the Paris 2030 agreements, without which keeping global warming to 1.5 percent will be in serious jeopardy,” the Declaration said. The leaders also noted that the scale of financing required to unlock Africa’s climate positive growth is “beyond the borrowing capacity of national balance sheets.”

In light of neither Africa – nor other developing countries – producing significant greenhouse gasses to the global environment, their leaders are becoming increasingly unwilling to continue accepting empty promises, especially since the consequences of unchecked climate change will devastate their countries’ ability to survive. During what some say was the hottest July on record this year, UN Secretary-General Guterres sounded an alarm at a recent news conference on climate.

“The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived. The air is unbreathable. The heat is unbearable. And the level of fossil fuel profits and climate inaction is unacceptable,” he said. “Leaders must lead. No more hesitancy. No more excuses. No more waiting for others to move first. There is simply no more time for that.”

Developed world leaders cannot continue to say such things without concrete actions being taken. The era of developing country patience has passed.

Gregory Simpkins, a longtime specialist in African policy development, is the Principal of 21st Century Solutions. He consults with organizations on African policy issues generally, especially in relating to the U.S. Government. He further acts as a consultant to the African Merchants Association, where he advises the Association in its efforts to stimulate an increase in trade between several hundred African Diaspora small and medium enterprises and their African partners.