Businessman and philanthropist Mo Ibrahim has called the COP27 climate conference “a disappointment” that paid little attention to Africa, despite the continent’s vulnerability to climate change and potential to help with the energy transition.
“The summit was promoted as an opportunity to listen to the most vulnerable nations and take significant steps towards tackling climate change. However, when it comes to Africa, little attention was paid to the specific needs of the continent,” he said in an interview with Lusa news agency.
According to the founder of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, “the final text continued to defer critical issues, delaying real progress on climate adaptation and energy access and including little recognition of the unique challenges Africa faces.
“Even in areas where progress was made, such as the launch of the African Carbon Market Initiative, the summit failed to create a global framework for managing carbon markets, despite it being a key objective of COP27,” he lamented.
The Sudanese businessman, who has been an activist in promoting good practices in governance and development of the African economy and society, was present at the summit, where he took a series of proposals developed by the Foundation in a report published eight months earlier, in May.
However, what he found in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, he criticised, was “another biased multilateral forum, dominated by the Global North, where the interests of the developing world proved secondary”.
While some of the Foundation’s proposals were addressed, “few were addressed in a meaningful way” and overshadowed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the resulting rise in energy and food prices.
As an example, he mentioned the lack of progress in cutting greenhouse gas emissions that curb global warming, the impact of which is being felt acutely in Africa.
Mo Ibrahim also pointed to the lack of immediate funds to speed up access to clean electricity for millions of Africans, or to compensate them for the losses and damage caused by climate change on the continent.
On the positive side, he welcomed the agreements for green hydrogen development between the European Union (EU) and Namibia and Egypt, the African Carbon Markets Initiative, and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s alliance with Brazil and Indonesia, holders of the world’s largest tropical forests, to negotiate sustainable financing mechanisms.
“In short, more dialogues, more participants, more promises, more targets, but little action,” he concluded.
COP27 ended on 20 November with the adoption of two main texts, a final declaration and a resolution on compensation for climate change damages suffered by vulnerable countries.
The Egyptian Presidency of COP27 considered the balance positive because the agreements reached meet the initial goal of making this the “conference of implementation”, while UN Secretary-General António Guterres regretted the lack of ambition of COP27 in terms of emissions reduction.
The 27th UN climate change summit aimed to maintain the goals of the Paris Agreement to halt global warming by limiting global warming to 2ºC (degrees celsius), and if possible to 1.5ºC, above the average values of the pre-industrial era.
Lusa
