November 14, 2024

VIOLET MENGO

Lusaka

THE 29th edition of the United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC) opened on November 12, 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan under the theme; “In solidarity for a Green World.”

Delegates have gathered for COP29, which has been dubbed the “Finance COP” due to its sharp focus on securing a robust climate finance agreement—the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG), aimed at addressing the urgent need for climate adaptation and driving a global phase – out of fossil fuels including oil and gas, a backbone of many developed countries.

Climate finance, according to the UNFCCC, refers to local, national or transnational financing, drawn from public, private and alternative sources of financing that seeks to support mitigation and adaptation actions that aimed at addressing climate change.

The Convention, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement call for financial assistance from Parties with more financial resources to those that are less endowed and more vulnerable.

For the African continent, COP29 is quite significant in a number of ways including the need for the realisation of the much-needed finance for adaptation and mitigation.

The African continent, just like other developing countries, look to COP29 to yield the desired finance from the developed countries for climate action.

When the African Heads of State and Governments gathered for the inaugural Africa Climate Summit (ACS) in Nairobi, Kenya from September 4-6, 2023, the leaders called upon the global community to act with urgency in reducing emissions, fulfilling its obligations, honouring past promises, and supporting the continent in addressing climate change.

The leaders called for the operationalisation of the Loss and Damage fund as agreed at COP27 and resolved for a measurable Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA) with indicators and targets to enable assessment of progress against negative impacts of climate change.

Some delegates

 
 Heads of State and Government also called for the strengthening     of    early warning systems and climate information services, as   well as   taking early action to protect lives, livelihoods and assets   and    inform long-term decision-making related to climate change   risks.

 The call was with the understanding that many African countries   face disproportionate burdens and risks arising from climate   change  related unpredictable weather events and patterns including prolonged droughts, devastating floods, out of season storms and wildfires, which cause massive humanitarian crises with detrimental impacts on economies, health, education, peace and security.

A Researcher on climate finance and co-leads Global finance and Investments Areas at the Alliance of Bioversity International and International Centre for Tropical Agriculture’s Centre action, Pedro Chilambe, shares that the NCQG, which will be discussed at COP29 aims to re-establish and update the 100 billion which was set in Copenhagen in 2009 for developing countries.

Chilambe

“COP29 is a very important opportunity to guarantee that climate finance helps countries to achieve the targets both for mitigation and adaptation. This needs to be a well voiced push for grants financing to be the pillar of this goal. We have over 30 percent of climate finance coming in the form of loans,” Mr Chilambe says.

 He explains that one of the biggest challenges has been to accessing adaptation finance, and points out that a lot needs to be done to guarantee that countries are capacitated to access climate finance including in form of grant based financial instruments and mechanisms.

“Standardising the processes will be ideal so that we do not need to build different expertise to be able to access each one of the mechanisms but also to simplify the processes because we find ourselves having to do so much to access funding climate finance.

He asserts that the process should not be complex to access the Green Climate Fund (GCF) for example, as it is today.

“It is not just the complexity in terms of what is required in the processes, it is also the amount of investment needed to access the investments. To develop a GCF, proposal, there are hundreds of thousands of dollars that need to be invested for a country to access the funding,” he said.

He disclosed that most of the project preparatory facilities that exist, ranges between 100, 000 to almost a million for countries to be able to get one proposal to move forward.

From the African Union perspective, one of the key issues that needs to be done at COP29 is for developed countries to honour the Copenhagen commitment.

Africa Union (AU) One Health Data Alliance, Mary Kariuki is of the view that the commitment should be honoured so that the African continent that is suffering most of the impacts and effects of climate change can mitigate and adapt.

“We need to ask ourselves what mitigation and adaptation action we are putting in place because livestock on Africa are well adapted to our climate and we are really not contributing so much to the green gas emissions, only about four percent,” she said.

Her call is for African Governments to push the agenda and ensure there is international commitment towards what was agreed in the past.

For Zambia, the Minister of Green Economy and Environment, Mike Mposha is leading the delegation of climate change experts and is very optimistic of a good ending of the climate negotiations.

Mr Mposha who, on November 12, had a bilateral meeting with the Executive Director of the Loss and Damage Fund, Dr Ibrahim Cheikh Diong, said meeting discussed among other issues, Zambia’s nomination to host the fund board meeting in 2026, which will let Zambia become the first host the fund board meeting in Africa.

Dr Diong was particularly impressed with Zambia’s instrumental role played in the in the growth of the loss and damage fund.