Ahead of this year’s Conference of the Parties (COP28), which will be hosted by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in December, the President of Kenya, William Ruto will lead Africa’s push for tangible measures and solutions in the climate change dialogue.
For the greater part of the year leading up to the UAE summit, Ruto will serve as chair of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which brings together African heads of state and government to discuss climate change.
His plans would include hosting the African Climate Action Summit from September 4 to 6 where African states will assess the commitments and measures made during the COP27 meeting.
A significant development during COP27 was the decision to create a loss and damage fund to aid nations most affected by climate change as well as the need for structural change in global climate emergency financing.
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“However, despite the breakthroughs, the overall outcome of the COP27 did not go far enough to address the scale of the climate emergency.
“There were no significant new steps taken to curb emissions to which is necessary which is necessary to reach the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees centigrade,” said the UNFCCC in a communique issued after the recently ended AU Summit.
The greatest drought in 40 years has afflicted Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia, and the UN estimates that 22 million people in these countries are at risk of going hungry.
People in the impacted areas, who mostly depend on raising livestock and practising subsistence farming, have been suffering through five consecutive poor rainy seasons since 2020.
At the AU Summit, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres noted that every flood, drought, famine, and heat wave faced in Africa was a result of the “brutal injustice of climate change.”
Story was adapted from news24
