Earlier this year, Tropical Cyclone Idai tore through southern Africa, killing hundreds, injuring thousands, and displacing even more. In Mozambique, as much as half of all annual crops and critical infrastructure were destroyed.
In total, more than 3 million people in the region were affected. It was a stark reminder of Africa’s vulnerability to the intensifying consequences of climate change.
Cyclones are nothing new, but as climate change progresses, they are becoming increasingly common: The Indian Ocean has an average of three cyclones per cyclone season, yet in this season alone, there were seven.
The same goes for other kinds of weather events. In Zimbabwe, more than 2 million people are now facing an acute water shortage as a result of climate change-induced drought.
However, even as Africa faces new challenges from climate change, it also has major opportunities to expand its economy and reduce still-pervasive poverty
The combined GDP of African countries vulnerable to climate change is on track to rise from US$2.45 trillion this year to US$3.46 trillion in 2024.
Can Africa secure this economic progress without contributing further to climate change?
The solution lies in a kind of Green New Deal – a comprehensive strategy for achieving sustainable growth, much like the one being championed by some Democratic politicians in the US.
A pillar of such a plan would involve making large-scale investments in renewable-energy deployment.
Whereas a US Green New Deal would focus on shifting away from fossil fuels, the infrastructure for which is already in place, an African strategy would be delivering energy (and energy infrastructure) from scratch.
About 60 percent of the people worldwide who lack access to electricity live in Africa.
Yet last year, Africa received less than 15 percent of global energy investment, and much of those limited funds are still going toward yesterday’s technologies.
Between 2014 and 2016, nearly 60 percent of Africa’s public investment in energy went to fossil fuels — US$11.7 billion, on average, each year.
This approach is not only environmentally irresponsible; it also makes little economic sense. Renewables are already outcompeting fossil fuels globally, and bold action on climate now promises to bring major economic benefits — to the tune of US$26 trillion globally through 2030.
Given this, the European Investment Bank — a longstanding source of energy investment in Africa — should approve an existing proposal to halt all lending for fossil fuel-reliant energy projects by the end of next year.
As for Africans, they are already promoting sustainable development. The African Union’s Agenda 2063, created in 2013, set an ambitious blueprint for attaining sustainable and inclusive growth over the subsequent half-century.
The African Renewable Energy Initiative (AREI), founded in 2015, focuses on drastically increasing the use of renewables, while expanding overall energy access.
On the ground, solar mini-grids are delivering cheap renewable energy to communities across Africa, increasingly at competitive prices (relative to comparably sized diesel-powered grids).
Solar home systems and clean-cooking solutions (which use cleaner, more modern equipment and fuels) are also providing cost-competitive clean energy access.
In East Africa, households equipped with solar systems saved an estimated US$750 each on kerosene and eliminated 1.8 tonnes of carbon dioxide over the first four years of use.
What a Green New Deal must do is bring such innovations to scale, through coordinated public and private investment in wind and solar-power generation — both on and off-grid — and support for the deployment of clean-cooking solutions. This should be integrated with broader efforts to foster green industrialization and entrepreneurship.
Substantial funding is already on offer. Earlier this year, the World Bank announced plans to provide US$22.5 billion for climate adaptation and mitigation in Africa for 2021 to 2025.
The African Development Bank, for its part, recently invested US$25 million in a renewable-energy equity fund that plans to add 533 megawatts (MW) of installed energy-generation capacity in sub-Saharan Africa.
This initial public investment is expected to mobilize an additional US$60 million to US$75 million from private investors.
However, if a country hopes to be a recipient of that private investment, it must have strong energy planning and an effective regulatory regime, which is crucial to functioning clean-energy markets and the emergence of project pipelines. That is why African countries must integrate climate action into all their economic and development planning.
To this end, a coalition of African countries, supported by the UN Economic Commission for Africa and the New Climate Economy, is working to facilitate meaningful, coordinated action that puts the entire continent on a more inclusive and sustainable growth path.
Partnerships with national finance and planning ministers, relevant development-finance institutions, and the private sector will support this process.
Overcoming the formidable challenge that climate change poses to Africa will depend on moments of collective focus and clarity.
The UN secretary-general’s climate summit this month should be just such a moment, with countries committing to step up their emissions-reduction targets under the 2015 Paris climate agreement, so as to reach net-zero emissions by mid-century.
Given their heightened vulnerability, African countries have every incentive to set the bar high, thereby putting pressure on others to ramp up their own contributions.
Only with concerted global action will we have any hope of averting climate catastrophe.
Carlos Lopes, a member of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate, is high representative of the African Union for partnerships with Europe post-2020.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate. While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs