A new research has shown that the flow of climate adaptation finance to Africa must increase up to tenfold by 2035 to meet the deepening effects of the climate crisis.
Campaigners have expressed their views about the desperate need to get funding to people who are already being affected by climate change as the Africa Climate Summit continued in Nairobi, Kenya’s capital in Africa which receives only 3% of global climate finance and remains the region most impacted by the climate emergency.
A Kenyan farmer, Phoebe Mwangangi, was quoted as telling attendees that changes in rainfall patterns in her south-eastern Makueni home town nearly 10 years ago meant that back then she had to walk for hours every day to find water for her livestock, disrupting her and her children’s lives.
“Yields were low and her cattle had grown weak, leaving her struggling to make ends meet,”said Mwangangi. “Farming and livestock is our livelihood, so we cannot do without it,”
According to research by the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA), without investment of roughly £80m a year until 2035, the continent could lose out on as much as £4.8tn of economic benefits within the next decade.
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“No country should be forced to choose between eradicating poverty, building climate resilience and honouring its debts, but right now that is what is happening,” said the former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, now chair of the GCA.
The organisation’s findings, among other things, suggest that earlier estimates of Africa’s nationally determined contributions (NDCs) towards climate resilience, which placed the required funding at half that, were a “vast underestimate … prepared at a time when climate impacts were not projected to occur as quickly or as strongly as they are”.
According to reports, the Kenyan president, William Ruto, has been seeking to move on from discussions of historical responsibility for carbon emissions, which, he said, “have become toxic” and led to a deadlock between developed and developing countries. With pledged climate funding from western countries, including the 2009 commitment to direct $100bn (£80bn) in annual climate finance, not forthcoming, he said African countries needed to explore other avenues.
“Let me be clear. These conversations are necessary,” Ruto said earlier this week at the summit. “Africa’s carbon footprint remains small … and a complex interplay of needs and responsibilities is a daily challenge but it should not lead to a deadlock. We must be alert to the fact that they can sometimes blind us to the bigger picture.”
Story was adapted from the Guardian.
