Africa's inaugural climate summit ends with mixed reviews

Africa’s first climate summit ended on Wednesday with the adoption of the Nairobi Declaration, which calls for new global taxes to fund climate change action, an increase in Africa’s renewable generation capacity, and a new debt relief architecture. Though some experts lauded the declaration as a bold step in the right direction, others said it placed a lot of emphasis on establishing systems that generate revenue for climate finance but lacked details and promoted false solutions as a viable alternative to phasing out harmful fossil fuels. “The declaration is laced with calls for green growth, cries for finance and veiled references to carbon trading, technology and the like, which open routes for green colonialism and render the continent nothing better than a vast carbon sink and experimental grounds for polluting nations and corporations,” Nnimmo Bassey, director of Health of Mother Earth Foundation, said. Ambitious goals The three-day summit co-hosted by the Kenyan government and the African Union was the first time the AU had summoned its leaders for a conversation on climate change. It brought together over 20,000 participants including over a dozen heads of state and multilateral organizations. It concluded with a total of $23 billion in new funding commitments which includes $3 billion annually for adaptation as part of the United States PREPARE program and $35 million in new investments from the U.S. Agency for International Development. The African Development Bank also committed to providing $25 billion towards climate financing by 2025. The Nairobi Declaration also called for the establishment of a global carbon tax regime on emitting sectors like fossil fuel, maritime transport, and aviation, which would make finance affordable and accessible for the continent's green growth ambitions. African leaders also committed to focusing their economic development plans on green growth development including expansion of just energy transitions and renewable energy generation. They called for $600 billion to increase Africa’s renewable energy generation capacity from 56 gigawatts in 2022 to at least 300 gigawatts by 2030. They also called on the global community to fulfill climate finance pledges, reform the multilateral financial system, and establish a new financing architecture for Africa’s debt relief, including the development of a new Global Climate Finance Charter by 2025. “We refuse to pursue the same path while hoping for different outcomes,” Ken Ofori-Atta, Ghana’s finance minister and chair of the Vulnerable Twenty Group, said. “We need to make debt work, to normalize the integration of loss and damage funding through the MDB system, revolutionise how we manage risk, and generate new resources through guarantees and credit enhancement that can offset high capital costs for climate investments.” African countries need around $2.8 trillion between 2020 and 2030 to implement their nationally determined contributions — representing more than 93% of the continent’s GDP. ‘False solutions’ However, civil society organizations criticized the declaration for promoting “false solutions such as carbon markets, carbon credits and the use of technology as a viable alternative to phasing out harmful fossil fuels.” “These concepts are led by Global North interests and are being marketed as African priorities when in reality they will embolden wealthy nations and large corporations to continue polluting Africa,” about 500 civil society organizations wrote in a statement. Oulie Keita, executive director for Greenpeace Africa, said civil society was hoping for “less talk and more action at the Africa climate summit” but the discussions were hijacked. “We cannot allow the richest nations and corporations to commodify nature,” she said. “On top of the damage it enables, [carbon] offsetting also distracts from needed climate action and rapid phase-out of coal, gas and oil.” Ahead of the summit, civil society groups had raised concerns that it would be “seized by Western governments, consultancy companies and philanthropic organisations hellbent on pushing a pro-West agenda and interests at the expense of Africa.” Hakim Baliraine, the chairperson of the Eastern and Southern Africa Small Scale Farmers Forum, added that the process to harmonize the final declaration failed to fully incorporate civil society asks and chart a path for implementation. “The how is not clear and so we need to dig into all these actions which have been put in the declaration one by one. Right now, I cannot say this is right or not, and that is why it needs to be probed,” he said. A step in the right direction Despite the criticism, some hailed the declaration as a bold step in the right direction. Aggrey Aluso, Africa region director for the Pandemic Action Network, said the declaration was “a good step towards joint African leadership and developing a common position for Africa on climate change.” Klaudine Wakasa, Mercy Corps’ director of advisory on energy, described the declaration as “a significant and bold move towards establishing Africa's inaugural formal green growth agenda” but warned that it needs to be inclusive. “This change must be truly transformational, engaging all stakeholders, including the communities most impacted by the effects of climate change,” Wakasa said. Mark Napier, CEO at FSD Africa, an investment firm that committed $19.5 million to support climate adaptation and climate-aligned infrastructure projects in Africa, added that some ideas that came out of the summit, such as global taxation and the establishment of new institutions to support climate action in the global south, are valuable, but the timeframe to implement these ideas may be too short. “I worry sometimes that some ideas that are potentially very good may be shot down because there was not much time to actualize their brilliance. We need to continue to explore some of these radical solutions, but we need to give ourselves the time to let these ideas germinate,” he said.