African leaders seek united front to press green growth goals

A landmark African climate summit was due to wrap up on Wednesday after attracting $23 billion in funding pledges as leaders sought to forge a united front and highlight the continent's potential as a green powerhouse.

Africa is acutely vulnerable to the growing impacts of climate change, yet Kenyan President William Ruto has fought for a narrative shift at the Nairobi conference, focusing on accelerating the region's clean energy transition.

"A new Africa is there and it means business," Ruto said, adding that the summit had seen funding pledges worth $23 billion "for green growth, mitigation and adaptation efforts" across the continent.

A final declaration from the Africa Climate Summit is expected to call on the international community to ease the continent's crushing debt burden and reform the global financial system to unblock investment in clean energy.

Leaders will also demand that rich carbon polluters honour long-standing climate pledges for poorer nations.

Analysts say a united African voice could generate momentum for a series of key gatherings leading to a crunch UN climate summit starting in November, including the G20 meeting in New Delhi this weekend.

But consensus is challenging across the diverse continent of 1.4 billion people, where some governments are championing a renewable-powered future while others defend their reserves of fossil fuels.

Competing visions of the world's energy future are likely to play out at the COP28 talks in the United Arab Emirates, where the world will take stock of the as-yet-inadequate efforts to slash planet-heating emissions.

Ruto said the summit had "successfully demonstrated that African solutions are not just appropriate for Africa's problems, they are necessary for global well-being".

He said earlier that Africa is well placed to take advantage of the need to move away from carbon-spewing fossil fuels, boasting a young population, vast renewable potential and natural resources.

This includes around 40 per cent of global reserves of cobalt, manganese and platinum crucial for batteries and hydrogen fuel cells.

Kenya has become a leader on renewables, pledging that they will make up 100 percent of its electricity mix by 2030.

Efforts at the summit to up investment in renewables were given a boost on Tuesday, with the UAE pledging $4.5 billion to accelerate Africa's switch to clean energy.

But there are daunting challenges for a continent where hundreds of millions lack access to electricity.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) says Africa hosts 60 percent of the world's best solar resources, but only three percent of energy investments.

In a report published Wednesday, the IEA and the African Development Bank Group urged donors and development finance institutions to scale up concessional funding to encourage private sector investment in Africa's energy sector.

"Concessional capital of around $28 billion per year is needed to mobilise $90 billion of private sector investment by 2030... a more than tenfold increase from today," the report said.

African countries facing mounting debt costs and a dearth of funds have called for a complete overhaul of the global financial architecture, adding to pressure on the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to unlock investment and climate finance.

African nations, among the hardest-hit by global warming, are pressing the world's wealthy polluters to make good on their pledge to provide $100 billion a year for clean energy and to help them brace for climate disasters.

Vulnerable nations least responsible for warming have won recognition for the need to have separate funding to help them cope with the effects of the heatwaves, droughts and floods already battering communities across the world.

In a report released this week Oxfam said the devastating drought that has gripped Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia as well as floods in South Sudan, have caused losses of between $15 billion and $30 billion in the two years to 2022, or around two to four percent of the region's GDP.

It estimated that between 2021 and 2023 the four countries lost about $7.4 billion in livestock alone.

"Millions of already struggling people saw their animals die and lost their ability to grow, sell or eat nutritious food, plunging them into even greater poverty and hunger," the report said.

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