The inaugural African Climate Summit will attract more than a dozen heads of state from African nations as the continent attempts to assert a larger voice on a global existential issue to which it contributes the least.
The African Union and the government of Kenyan President William Ruto convened the summit on Monday in Nairobi with the goal of exerting greater influence internationally and attracting greater funding and support.
“For a very long time, we have looked at this as a problem. There are immense opportunities as well,” Ruto said of the climate crisis, speaking of multibillion-dollar economic possibilities, new financial structures, Africa’s huge mineral wealth and the ideal of shared prosperity. “We are not here to catalogue grievances.”
In spite of this, there is significant resentment on the continent over being pushed to develop more sustainably than the richest nations in the world, who have historically contributed the majority of the emissions that warm the planet, and to do so while a large portion of the support that has been promised to Africa hasn’t materialized.
“This is our time,” Mithika Mwenda with the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance told the gathering, asserting that the annual flow of climate assistance to the continent is a tenth or less of what is needed and a “fraction” of the budget of some polluting companies.
Poorer nations received more than $83 billion in climate assistance in 2020, a 4% increase from the year before but still short of the $100 billion yearly target set in 2009.
“We have an abundance of clean, renewable energy, and it’s vital that we use this to power our future prosperity. But to unlock it, Africa needs funding from countries that have got rich off our suffering,” Mohamed Adow with Power Shift Africa said before the summit.
In the meantime, the advocacy group ONE campaign warned in a report made public before the summit that high interest rates and a lack of capital from institutions like the World Bank have made debt for low-income countries increasingly unsustainable and have slowed down financing for urgently needed climate solutions.
“In addition to decreased health and social spending, that means they cannot harness their considerable resources to deliver climate solutions,” the report read.
John Kerry, the climate envoy for the US government, and Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary-general, are among the participants from outside of Africa. Guterres has stated he will address finance as one of “the burning injustices of the climate crisis.“
Ruto’s video greeting, which was made available before to the summit, focused primarily on planting trees but neglected to mention his administration’s intention to overturn a decades-long ban on commercial logging this year, which concerned environmental watchdogs. The government claims that only mature trees in state-run plantations would be taken, although the decision has been contested in court.
“When a country is holding a conference like we are, we should be leading by example,” said Isaac Kalua, a local environmentalist.
Kenya has banned single-use plastic bags and gets 93% of its energy from renewable sources, but it has trouble implementing several other climate-friendly changes.
In contrast to the customary government convoys, Ruto arrived at the activities on Monday in a compact electric vehicle. He travelled on streets that were free of the sometimes smoky, poorly maintained buses and vans.
Nearly 600 million people live without access to electricity in Africa, despite the continent’s enormous potential for solar and other renewable energy. Thousands of deaths and billions of dollars in damage that, like climate change itself, have impacts well beyond the continent are another concern for Africa.
“When the apocalypse happens, it will happen for all of us,” Ruto warned.