Dhesigen Naidoo
Pretoria - Amid the great jamboree that was Africa Climate Week, one of the important messages hidden within the festive atmosphere of a much-needed global expression of Afro-optimism, was that the continent must make hard choices.
What is the path to climate prosperity, and did the African Climate Summit deliver the necessary boost?
The expression of the UN Secretary-General of the vision for Africa as a “renewable energy superpower” was powerful.
The expected follow-up of statements of support from Africa’s partners in the developed world could have been more robust. “Opportunities that Africa and the world are primed to capitalise.”
The African Climate Summit attracted Heads of State, leaders of multilateral and regional institutions as well as development institutions including the World Bank, the African Development Bank, private sector leaders, philanthropies, civil society, and activists. The karibu (welcome) was real, the opportunity was exceptional, but the pledges by the rich countries remained lukewarm.
With the 1970 United Nations resolution of 0.7% GDP devoted by developed countries to ODA a distant memory, the new battle is to get the developed world, and in particular, major historical emitters to meet a currently very paltry target of $100 billion that was due in 2020.
The UN Conference on Trade and Development in its 2019 estimate, put the actual need number at $2.5 trillion; and in 2023, we could easily double that.
Africa’s participation in carbon markets had a pinnacle focus at ACW, and had some of the larger pledge numbers associated with it. Both developed and emerging economies made substantive pledges to invest in carbon trading on the continent. Its origins in the Clean Development Mechanism in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol which has evolved with Article 6 of the Paris Agreement.
Nairobi was a grand theatre of that expression of Article 6. John Kerry, the US president’s Special Envoy on Climate Change set the ball rolling on at the summit emphasising carbon markets as a crucial tool in Africa’s climate change relationship with the world. This was followed by huge pledges in this direction with the UAE Carbon Alliance topping the list with $450 million for carbon market investments.
The smell of real money, for a change, is attractive.
Civil society and NGOs have expressed their scepticism and called for an end of the UN scheme for the conservation of forestation and the REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) system for more than a decade.
This criticism went further in the run-up to Cop26 in Glasgow, citing various failed examples, including a 2017 EU study that concluded that 80% of carbon market projects did not meet their desired goals under the Clean Development Mechanism with many resulting in what we might call land grabs.
The second critique is that once that carbon sequestration asset is bound in a carbon trade agreement, it is no longer available to, in this case, an African country as a contributor to its own development.
The recipient country (seller) cannot use that asset to offset its own development investments which may include an increase in carbon emissions.
For a continent that is currently contributing less than 4% of global emissions – this is a hard sell. It can only work if all further development ambition runs exclusively on renewable energy.
The feasibility of this for a continent with its current state of indebtedness and low access to capital markets, technology, and capacity is highly questionable.
On the other hand, saying no to this inflow of new investment is not an easy prospect.
South Africa and Africa need to up their analysis on the implications of the new Carbon Trading regime that finds the sweet spot of new investment while retaining control of the continent’s carbon sequestration assets.
Naidoo is Presidential Climate Commission’s head for adaptation and research fellow at the Institute for Security Studies.
Pretoria News