Africa Climate Summit highlights a great policy divide

11 Sep 2023 - by Jon Marks

Climate change – closely linked to the intractable issues of poverty and inequality – is an issue preoccupying policy-makers around the world, but its impacts are particularly acute across swathes of Africa. But while calls for swifter action to unlock larger amounts of financing were paramount at the inaugural Africa Climate Summit (ACS), held in Nairobi on 4-6 September, it was also apparent that views differ widely on how to address the challenge.

As host, Kenya’s President William Ruto skilfully steered the ACS towards a final Nairobi Declaration that linked the climate crisis with a restructuring of the international financial architecture and regearing of resources distribution. African leaders argue this is essential to relieve pressure on their economies and the negative impacts of climate change and global macroeconomic downturns.

The ACS’ conclusions will feed into the 30 November-12 December COP28 global climate conference in Dubai, and are likely to feature at other meetings in a hectic period, including the September G20 summit in India and the International Monetary Fund (IMF)/World Bank Group (WBG) annual meetings in Marrakech in October.

African countries will call for a huge upturn in spending at COP28, where everyone will agree on the need to provide more resources, but will differ over how much should be mobilised ($100bn/yr anyone?), how funding flows are to be structured and the extent that ‘loss and damage’, wider debt relief and other concepts that would favour African governments can be accommodated.

While much of the debate often focuses on future risks, delegates at the ACS were reminded of the current reality, with protests outside the Kenyatta International Conference Centre (KICC) by indigenous groups whose livelihoods have been wrecked by climate volatility.

Kenya is not the continent’s poorest economy, but in 2022 faced its worst drought in 40 years. Inside the venue, the International Crisis Group launched a briefing, Absorbing Climate Shocks and Easing Conflict in Kenya’s Rift Valley, which showed how failed rainy seasons “had sharpened competition among herders, farmers and conservancy owners for land and water, often resulting in bloodshed”.

Communities are being impoverished and destabilised across Africa, driving inter-communal strife and leading populations often crammed into unsustainable urban areas to look for a different future, which may mean mass migration or supporting military juntas, as in the Sahel.

The impact of climate change has been compounded by inflation, the Ukraine war and other global crises that threaten to stymie efforts by wealthy countries to redirect funds to the most vulnerable. But just as it was at the 2015 Paris Climate conference and long before, the question is not so much what should be done, but more why policies that have already been committed to are not being implemented.

In a welter of official speeches and side events in Nairobi, European officials committed once again to a ‘turbo-charged’ relationship with the continent and development finance organisations announced new (or reheated) facilities and successful milestones.

Many of the commitments outlined in Nairobi – which Ruto said totalled $23bn – were already well-known. The United Arab Emirates announced a $4.5bn package, ahead of its hosting of COP28. This seemed to be a restatement of earlier deals and commitments, although the UAE did add that the African Development Bank’s Africa50 investment platform would act as a strategic partner in helping to identify suitable projects (AE 487/1, 487/35, 479/14).

COP28 president-designate Sultan Al-Jaber was among the many to restate the view that financing of the energy transition remains woefully short. “We need a complete upgrade, in fact a surgical intervention of the global financial architecture that was built for a different era,” Al-Jaber said in his speech. “I am also calling on donors to double adaptation finance by 2025… We also need early pledges for the loss and damage fund to help vulnerable countries.”

At one side meeting, European Investment Bank vice president Thomas Ostros reiterated the Luxembourg-based multilateral’s commitment to remaining among the world’s major development financiers but admitted mobilising all the required financing was problematic, given factors such as the United States’ electoral cycle and European governments’ focus on “other things”.

In highly choreographed speeches and presentations to Ruto before his closing remarks on 6 September, representatives of indigenous peoples said governments had to protect vulnerable populations, especially from “abuses of carbon credits by unscrupulous operators”.

This was a big theme in Nairobi, to the incomprehension of western DFIs and others for whom creating a coherent carbon market represents an important tool for mitigating climate change. Civil society groups want much more to be done without what they believe are the ‘global capitalist’ trappings associated with carbon credits and green bonds.

A gulf in thinking between local civil society players on the one hand and governments, big business and philanthropic players on the other is hardly a surprise. The divide between African and industrialised governments over energy development and climate policy is another reality that African Energy has seen intensifying in recent years and will feature larger than ever at COP28.

The differing perceptions were elegantly expressed by Africa-EU Energy Partnership head of secretariat Johan van den Berg, who closed a 4 September meeting by saying that policy-makers should appreciate that “for Africans, access has to be the most important issue”, even if renewables-focused industrialised countries’ thinking was influenced “by a different view of the transition”.

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Discover more of our reporting on this topic (free to view): Just energy transition and the commercialisation of COP