COP disappoints Africa again

By Gregory Simpkins

As I have written about previously, the international community has discussed what to do about climate change for decades. Many promises of help for developing countries, such as those in Africa and the Caribbean, have been made but not fulfilled even though these developing countries are the victims of climate change and not the perpetrators.

The Conference of the Parties (COP) is the decision-making body of the United Nations effort to combat climate change. It has met every year since March 1995, but all the promises made over the past nearly three decades have not significantly mitigated the climate risks for African countries.

Hundreds of people have been killed and hundreds of thousands have been displaced in African countries alone because of floods, tropical storms and droughts in recent years.

In fact, if nothing significant is achieved to alleviate the impact of climate change, Africa’s economic growth will be stunted by climate shocks, creating a poverty trap for millions of citizens who will be on the widest section of the “highway to climate hell” – a phrase popularized by UN Secretary-General António Guterres. Countries such as Sudan, Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso and Chad face a reduction in gross domestic product (GDP) of more than 80 percent by 2100 if no significant climate mitigation is achieved by then.

At COP26 in 2021, Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change, said the devastating loss of lives and livelihoods this year due to extreme weather events clarifies how important it was to convene COP26 despite the impacts of the COVID pandemic still being felt, according to the Nigerian newspaper Premium Times.

“We are on track for a global temperature rise of 2.7C, while we should be heading for the 1.5C goal,” she said. “Clearly, we are in a climate emergency. Clearly, we need to address it. Clearly, we need to support the most vulnerable to cope. To do so successfully, greater ambition is now critical,” the newspaper reported.

In the summer of 2023, African leaders attending the inaugural Africa Climate Summit held in Nairobi, Kenya, stressed the importance of decarbonizing the global economy for equality and shared prosperity and urged investment to promote the sustainable use of Africa’s natural assets for the continent’s transition to low carbon development and contribution to global decarbonization.

Promises Made, Promises Not Kept

Since developed world promises have not produced the financing required for the kind of transition being called for, Africans are increasingly unwilling to wait for promises on environmental assistance to be provided for them. In November 2023, the Chief Executive Officers and Chairpersons of 55 African companies, from a diverse range of sectors, representing more than US$150 billion in revenue and more than 900,000 employees across 50 African countries, supported by the UN Global Compact, gathered at COP 27.

They took the opportunity to introduce the Africa Business Leaders Coalition (ABLC) to the world, whose vision, they said, is to bring the perspectives of African business leaders, and their ecosystems, into the global conversation to bring actively and meaningfully to bear the private sector perspective and engagement on the continent’s most pressing issues. At COP28 in 2023, the president of the conference, Sultan Al Jaber, claimed there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C, the Guardian and the Centre for Climate Reporting stated at the time.

Al Jaber also said a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves”. The comments were “incredibly concerning” and “verging on climate denial”, scientists said, and they were at odds with the position of the UN Secretary General, António Guterres.

Al Jaber made the comments in ill-tempered responses to questions from Mary Robinson, the chair of the Elders group and a former UN special envoy for climate change, during a live online event on November 21 2023. As well as running Cop28 in Dubai, Al Jaber is also the chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company, ADNOC, which many observers see as a serious conflict of interest.

That brings us to 2024. At the conclusion of two weeks of negotiations at COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, Africa Business magazine reported that there was an agreed text on climate finance – the funding needed to slow down climate change and adapt to its impacts. But as delegates departed from the conference, it was hard to find voices that believed the compromise represents a good outcome for Africa.

“We leave Baku without an ambitious climate finance goal, without concrete plans to limit global temperature rise to 1.5°C, and without the comprehensive support desperately needed for adaptation and loss and damage,” said Evans Njewa, chair of the Least Developed Countries bloc at COP29 to the magazine. “This is not just a failure; it is a betrayal.”

Under the agreed text, governments set a goal for developed countries to support developing countries with at least US$300 billion a year in climate finance by 2035. Nominally, this represents a tripling of climate finance commitments. The problem? The US$300 billion figure is widely acknowledged to be only a fraction of what is needed to assist countries that did the least to cause climate change, but are now bearing the brunt of its effects.

The so-called “new collective quantified goal on climate finance”, or NCQG, was supposed to be based on need. Governments went through a lengthy process of calculating their financial needs for mitigation and adaptation.

Based on this, developing country governments demanded that the NCQG should add-up to US$1.3 trillion per year, the magazine reported.

Yet the idea that global policymakers would follow a robust procedure to arrive at a needs-based goal ran into the reality of tight purse strings in developed nation capitals, who offered a target of just US$250 billion. When this prompted a walk-out by the Alliance of Small Island States group of countries, the offer was raised to US$300 billion, with a vague mention of “scaling up” financing to US$1.3 trillion pasted into the text, according to Africa Business.

Unlike the spread of disease, which rapidly affects the rest of the world though travel by those affected, climate change apparently is seen more as an individual country problem despite the discussion of the international community banding together to solve what many consider an existential crisis. Indeed, each country must mitigate the impact of climate change on its own citizens and territories, and it seems many of the developed world governments, considering their own estimated costs for climate change mitigation, may feel they owe it to their own people to maintain sufficient funds to meet their goals.

Then again, many of these developing countries either have a commitment to fossil fuels or lack the technical capacity to implement the recommended remedies.

Whatever the reasons why promises made on climate change mitigation finance continue to fall short of the estimated costs for developed countries, something has to change. Either the UN should temper its alarmism on the impact of climate change of find a way to make implementation of such program operative.

If you lived on the East African island nation of Seychelles, which is threatened with succumbing to the sea in the foreseeable future, all the warnings of global catastrophe would only heighten your fear for your future and that of your country. Continuing the warnings without sufficient assistance to address this challenge must be increasingly intolerable for those in this predicament, and one wonders how COP30 will unfold in this atmosphere of mistrust caused by empty commitments.

Gregory Simpkins, a longtime specialist in African policy development, is the Principal of 21st Century Solutions. He consults with organizations on African policy issues generally, especially in relating to the U.S. Government. He further acts as a consultant to the African Merchants Association, where he advises the Association in its efforts to stimulate an increase in trade between several hundred African Diaspora small and medium enterprises and their African partners.