Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), Kristalina Georgieva says the fund has received $40 billion in pledges for its new Resilience and Sustainability Trust to address challenges such as climate change.
Recall that a report by the intergovernmental panel on climate change in April showed that climate investment globally needs to increase by up to six times from the roughly $640 billion spent in 2020 to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
Georgieva who made this known in her address to the Ibrahim Governance Forum, an Africa-focused conference, scheduled to mark six months until the COP27 climate conference in Cairo, said the IMF had launched the new financing facility for low and middle-income countries in April with the goal of raising at least $45 billion.
Read also: Report: Climate change to push over 40 million Africans into poverty
She said that building resilience to the effects of climate change will cost trillions of dollars over the next decade, adding that the devastating effects of climate change are robbing Africa of lives and livelihoods.
Speaking further, she said that many African countries were dealing with droughts that were increasing food and political insecurity, adding that African countries cannot face these overlapping crises – climate, food, pandemic – alone.
“Now the surge in food, fuel and fertiliser prices have dramatically raised import costs, all in the context of already high sovereign debt and limited fiscal capacity,” Georgieva said. “IMF lending to African countries in the last year was 13 times the annual average”.
Story was adapted from Thisday.
