South Africa recently unveiled an ambitious upgraded plan for cutting its emissions, but the country’s environment minister warned that its success hinges entirely on international climate financing support, including grants.
In September, Africa’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter adopted a revised climate target that falls within a range: The upper limit is compatible with 2 degrees Celsius of warming, while the lower limit is in line with a 1.5 degrees Celsius increase. The latter is the preferred goal of the Paris Climate Agreement and what the world will collectively strive to put on the table at next month’s COP 26 in Glasgow.
“[Our target] is completely dependent on a range of financing sources, bilateral and multilateral support and that support would need to be both in the form of grant financing and concessional financing. There would also be a private investment component,” Barbara Creecy, South Africa’s environment minister, told Devex in an interview. “We are very clear that where we get to on the spectrum between the 2 degrees and the 1.5-degree target really depends on the extent of support we receive from the international community.”
South Africa intends to limit greenhouse gas emissions to 398 to 510 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2025, and to 350 to 420 metric tons by 2030. That’s significantly lower than targets communicated in 2016, according to the World Resources Institute, a nonprofit research organization.
“There's a justice issue involved here because we are not the ones that have contributed to the emissions that are creating the problem.”
— Barbara Creecy, environment minister, South AfricaAbout 90% of South Africa’s energy is generated by coal-fired power stations, with Eskom, the country’s electricity utility, heavily indebted. Transforming the utility to produce green power would cost over $25 billion, Creecy estimated. Climate envoys from the United States, Britain, Germany, and France visited the country at the end of September to explore a transition away from coal.
Creecy said that while South Africa is considered a middle-income country, it has an onerous government debt and 34% of its population is unemployed.
“We don't qualify for grant financing because we're not a least developed country, but nevertheless, we will struggle to engage in our transition if the only form of finance that's available to us is in the form of loans at commercial rates,” she said.
Minister Creecy has been quite outspoken over the last months on climate financing, calling in particular on rich countries to help mobilize $750 billion per year from 2030 onwards through both public and private sources.
That is more than seven times the promised $100 billion a year the developed world promised — and has thus far failed to deliver — from 2020 onwards. The most industrialized countries pledged in 2015 to help low-income nations tackle climate change through mitigation and adaptation by providing yearly aid by 2020.
About two-thirds of existing climate financing so far comes via loans and not grants, according to a report last year from the European Network on Debt and Development, which crunched data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Making sure high-income countries step up and deliver on their climate financing promise will be key in reestablishing trust with the lower-income countries at the COP 26 climate summit, the minister said.
“There's a justice issue involved here because we are not the ones that have contributed to the emissions that are creating the problem,” Creecy said. Africa accounts for the smallest share of global emissions, at 3.8%, according to the CDP, a nonprofit group focused on climate disclosures. South Africa alone accounts for about a third of that.
Creecy has also been adamant about the need to define clear climate adaptation goals, another key issue for the upcoming 26th U.N. Climate Change Conference of the Parties. Under the Paris Agreement, countries agreed to establish a global goal on adaptation to increase the world’s resilience to climate change — but never quantified it. The world has largely focused on coming up with mitigation efforts.
“We don't have a choice other than to solve these issues because these issues cannot be solved by any one country on its own. It can only be solved in the multilateral situation.”
—The minister recently called on countries to work toward increasing the climate resilience of the global population by 50% by 2030, and by at least 90% by 2050.
“Adaptation has been a bit of a stepsister in the way that it's been treated,” she said. “I suppose the politics around it was that certain countries didn't want to move towards adaptation because they saw that as signaling defeat that we've lost the battle against climate change.”
But after some eye-opening months with wildfires spreading across Europe and Australia, floods in China and Germany, and many other abnormal weather patterns, “I think that it's now becoming a little bit of a moot point to say that we don't want to deal with adaptation because it means we're defeated on the mitigation side,” Creecy said.
Creecy said sub-Saharan Africa is warming up at twice the global rate and “even on a 2-degree[s] scenario that is going to significantly wipe out agricultural production and food security in southern Africa and is going to lead to prolonged periods of drought” and mass migration like the one already noticeable across West Africa.
A tropical cyclone swept through South Africa’s semi-desert area of Northern Cape last year, which in two hours brought a year’s worth of rainfall, the minister said. Meanwhile, a part of Madagascar is at risk of what the United Nations is calling a "climate change famine” due to a lack of rain.
“These are the extremes that all of us are starting to deal with,” Creecy said. “We have to climate-proof our infrastructure. We're going to have to change our agricultural production in order to deal with our food security. And we're also going to have to do a massive public education program so that people understand what's happening.”
Asked if she’s feeling optimistic ahead of COP 26 based on the conversations she has had so far with counterparts, Creecy said she sees herself as a pragmatist.
“We don't have a choice other than to solve these issues because these issues cannot be solved by any one country on its own. It can only be solved in the multilateral situation,” she said. “And I think that the multilateral situation requires patience, fortitude, and consistency.”
This coverage exploring innovative finance solutions and how they enable a more sustainable future, is presented by the European Investment Bank.