Inaugural Africa Climate Summit opens
Hard-hit continent with 1.3B people demands more say, financing
NAIROBI, Kenya – The first African Climate Summit opened Monday with heads of state and others asserting a stronger voice on a worldwide issue that affects their continent the most even though its 1.3 billion people contribute to global warming the least.
Kenyan President William Ruto’s government and the African Union launched a ministerial session as more than a dozen heads of state began to arrive, determined to wield more global influence and bring in far more financing and support. The first speakers included young people, who demanded a bigger voice in the process.
“For a very long time we have looked at this as a problem. There are immense opportunities as well,” Ruto said of the climate crisis, speaking of multibilliondollar economic possibilities, new financial structures, Africa’s huge mineral wealth and the ideal of shared prosperity.
“We are not here to catalog grievances,” he said.
And yet there is some frustration on the continent about being asked to develop in cleaner ways than the world’s richest countries – which have long produced most of the emissions that endanger climate – and to do it while much of the support that has been pledged hasn’t appeared.
“This is our time,” Mithika Mwenda of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance told the gathering, claiming that the annual flow of climate assistance to the continent is one-tenth or less of what is needed and a “fraction” of the budget of some polluting companies.
“We need to immediately see the delivery of the $100 billion” of climate finance pledged annually by rich countries to developing ones, said Simon Stiell, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. More than $83 billion in climate financing was given to poorer countries in 2020, a 4% increase from the previous year but still short of the goal set in 2009.
Kenya alone needs $62 billion to implement its plan to reduce national emissions that contribute to global warming, the president said.
“We have an abundance of clean, renewable energy and it’s vital that we use this to power our future prosperity. But to unlock it, Africa needs funding from countries that have got rich off our suffering,” Mohamed Adow of Power Shift Africa said ahead of the summit.
Outside attendees to the summit include the U.S. government’s climate envoy, John Kerry, and United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who has said he will address finance as one of “the burning injustices of the climate crisis.”
“Of 20 countries most affected by the climate crisis, 17 are here in Africa,” Kerry said.
As Kenya’s president spoke, hundreds of people joined a “people’s march” on climate in Nairobi, holding signs demanding the targeting of fossil fuels. “Stop the neocolonial scramble for oil and gas in Africa,” one read. Ruto in the past has said the “addiction” to fossil fuels must end.
One project being protested is the TotalEnergies-funded 897-mile East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline in Uganda and Tanzania.
“We know that fossil fuel companies have lots of subsidies,” so more subsidies for solar power are needed to massively scale up renewable sources, said Ugandan activist Vanessa Nakate.
The U.N. has estimated that loss and damage in Africa due to climate change are projected to be between $290 billion and $440 billion in the period from 2020 to 2030, depending on the degree of warming.