Kenyan President William Ruto will lead Africa’s push for concrete actions and solutions in the climate change discourse ahead of this year’s Conference of the Parties (COP28) to be hosted by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) in December.
This was revealed during the AU summit in Addis Ababa.
As chairperson of the Committee of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Ruto will, for the greater part of the year before the UAE summit, see to it the global south builds political momentum.
The highlight of his agenda would be the hosting of the African Climate Action Summit from 4 to 6 September.
It is at this summit that African nations will review the pledges and actions taken after the COP27 summit.
The agreement on the establishment of a loss and damage fund to assist countries most impacted by climate change was a major breakthrough at the COP27, as was the call for structural reform in global climate emergency financing.
“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.
It is estimated by the UN 22 million people in Ethiopia, Kenya, and Somalia – the areas affected by the worst drought in 40 years – are at risk of hunger.
Since 2020, people in affected areas, who make a living primarily through livestock and subsistence farming, have been suffering through five consecutive bad rainy seasons.
UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, at the AU Summit, said “the brutal injustice of climate change is on full display with every flood, drought, famine, and heat wave endured on this continent”.
With that context, the UNFCCC said: “Yet without ambition in emission reduction, the impact of climate disasters, which disproportionately affect vulnerable populations in Africa, will rise.”
The gravity of the situation, according to it, was that by 2030, if no progress was made, climate change could reduce Africa’s GDP by 15%.
“The situation, therefore, demands bold action to steer the continent towards a climate resilient, socially just, decarbonised future for the political, economic, and environmental stability of the continent.”
In addition to climate change, African countries are burdened by huge debts to international creditors, the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic, and the global energy and food crisis owing to the war in Ukraine