Africa Seeks Billions in Climate Change Funding

Nations in Africa have spoken out on the need for funding to help take on the effects of climate change in that part of the world – saying that, by 2020, continual minimum funding of $267 billion per annum will be required.

The requirement is featured within a new report issued by the 50-nation strong African Group to the United Nations, in advance of the upcoming Kyoto Protocol update agreement, negotiations on which need to have been finalised by December 2009.

The report describes Africa as “...one of the most vulnerable continents to climate change, with major development and poverty eradication challenges and limited capacity for adaptation.”

Funding for Climate Change

$200 billion of the $267 billion total funding for climate change would be used across Africa to aid greenhouse gas emission reduction efforts – obtaining energy from renewable sources like hydro or wind power, rather than from fossil fuel burning, for example.  The remainder would be used to build up physical defences against the prospect of rising tides, like higher sea walls, and to develop crops capable of surviving through droughts. 

This $267 million, the African Group said, represented approximately 0.5 per cent of the GDP (Gross Domestic Product) of developed countries.

Fighting Global Warming – the Global Cost

At the beginning of 2009, the EU issued a report in which it forecast that the total global cost of fighting global warming would have reached about 175 billion euros per annum within the next 11 years.

Commenting on the African Group report, the World Wildlife Fund’s Kathrin Gutmann spoke of how it highlighted "...the scale of what's needed”.

“We're not talking about tens of billions of dollars...it's far more”, she said, adding: “There's a very strange chicken and egg situation”.

By this, Gutmann was referring to the developed nations’ wish to provide finance in response to developing nations specifying exactly what they want it for while, conversely, developing nations are seeking the cash in advance of establishing precisely what they can do with it.

In the same report, the African Group called on developed nations to reduce emissions of CO2 and other greenhouse gases down to a minimum of 40 per cent below 1990 levels – 20 per cent further than the terms of the Kyoto Protocol and, thus, way beyond the aims of nearly all those concerned.

“At lower stabilization levels, the additional climate impacts are unacceptable to Africa”, the report asserted.