COP30 Motif on Africa’s Climate Pathways

Hamza Kyeyune
19 dakika önce
6 dakikada okunur

Africa’s climate pathways include the 8,000-km Great Green Wall, Mission 300 to address a large portion of the energy gap that exists on the continent and initiatives such as debt-for-climate project swaps

Ahead of November’s COP30 climate summit, a second Africa Climate Summit recently wrapped up in Ethiopia, with African leaders pledging to accelerate investment in renewable energy.

In a declaration, they sent a strong message on driving green growth with homegrown resources, calling for establishing a coalition of African critical mineral producers.

The declaration will serve as Africa's blueprint and a unified Africa position at the COP30 negotiations, emphasizing the need for new, innovative climate models aligned to Africa’s sustainable development pathways.

Among Africa’s climate pathways include the 8,000-km Great Green Wall, Mission 300 to address a large portion of the energy gap that exists on the continent and initiatives such as debt-for-climate project swaps.

Great Green Wall

The Great Green Wall is an initiative to increase the amount of arable land in the region bordering Africa's Sahara Desert.

The project does not build a solid wall, but a patchwork of productive and green landscapes.

It spans 8,000 kilometers from Senegal to Djibouti, stretching across the Sahel. Eleven countries in the Sahel-Sahara region including Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan are part of the project, which was launched by the African Union (AU) in 2007.

The project contributes to global climate goals by sequestering carbon, addresses the global response to desertification which threatens the ecosystems and promotes sustainable land use.

Fundamental to this initiative is restoring 100 million hectares of land by planting and growing a wall of trees, grasslands and vegetation to curb desertification, using sustainable agricultural techniques, promoting water conservation, sequestering 250 million tons of carbon, and creating 10 million green jobs by 2030.

However, the project has faced significant challenges, including a lack of sufficient funding, war and political instability in the region which contributed to the member countries’ inability to make it a low priority.

In 2020, the United Nations (UN) issued a report evaluating the initiative and noted that the initiative was not on track to meet its goals by 2030. The initiative had restored less than 20% of the 100 million hectares and created only 350,000 jobs.

Leaders revamped and renewed the project in 2021 with an update called the Great Green Wall Accelerator, which is designed to meet the initiative’s goals by 2030.

Based on the UN findings, COP30 ought to ensure that required attention to sustain momentum to meeting the goals set for 2030 in the project. This aligns to the African Union reiterating the need for a global climate justice, strengthening climate multilateralism and accelerating implementation of the Paris Agreement.

Debt-for-Climate Project Swaps

Debt-for-Climate Swaps (DFCS) have been highlighted as an important pathways to address climate change crisis in Africa.

They are agreements where creditors relieve a debtor country from their contractual debt obligations in exchange for a commitment to invest the freed-up funds in climate adaptation or mitigation projects.

Once the creditor cancels some debt in exchange for climate commitments, the debtor country uses the freed-up debt service payments to finance verifiable climate adaptation and mitigation projects such as renewable energy, forest conservation, or sustainable infrastructure.

Such transactions provide opportunities for countries to enhance both fiscal stability and climate resilience, mobilizing critical investment in areas such as urban infrastructure, sustainable agriculture, water security, forest conservation and restoration.

Innovations like debt-for-climate swaps among other financing instruments are critical at this juncture where financial needs for development, climate and nature in low income countries are rapidly expanding, while developed countries are cutting aid.

The Trump administration announced in February 2025, it was cancelling more than 90% of the foreign aid, equivalent to USD60 billion in overall US assistance around the world. In March, the United Kingdom government announced that its aid budget would fall from 0.5% to 0.3% of GDP over the next two years. France, Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland and other countries also announced significant aid budget cuts in the following months.

Meanwhile, many of the poorest developing countries are in danger of defaulting on their debt, including the world’s top most climate vulnerable countries. It becomes even much harder for such countries to service their debts once natural disasters strike, since lots of money is spent on reconstruction.

In 2023, Gabon became the first African nation to launch a debt-for-nature swap, securing up to $450 million.

According to International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), at least five other African countries are collaborating on what could become the world's first joint "debt-for-nature" swap, aiming to raise over $2 billion to protect a coral-rich region of the Indian Ocean.

Similar initiatives like the Great Blue Wall, an initiative that aims to create interconnected protected and conserved marine areas (seascapes) to counteract the effects of climate change and global warming while unlocking the potential of the blue economy to become to driver of nature conservation and sustainable development.

The target of the Great Blue Wall initiative is to support its coral reefs by protecting, restoring, and conserving 2 million hectares of ocean and coastal ecosystems by 2030.

African countries backing the broader Great Blue Wall conservation plan include Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, Somalia, South Africa, Tanzania and the Comoros.

Therefore, increased debt swaps for climate negotiations at COP30, would be part of the solution to debt distress and a way of directing additional resources to climate and conservation.

Mission 300

Mission 300, a transformative program to address a large portion of the energy gap that exists on the continent, by connecting at least 300 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030. With funding from African Development Bank and World Bank, the initiative was launched in 2025 to address the challenge of nearly 600 million people in the region lacking electricity.

According to the UN, 685 million people, or 4 in 5 people in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly in rural and isolated areas remain without access to electricity, representing more than 80% of the world's unelectrified population.

This lack of access contributes to the reliance on wood and charcoal for cooking, leading to deforestation and air pollution, poor health, hinders job creation, education, economic growth and low quality of life.

According to various reports, Africa's population is growing exponentially, but electricity access expansion is not keeping pace.

Therefore, Africa with its abundant resources and growing population must shape an energy mix that addresses its development needs while staying true to its global environmental commitments.

Abundant renewable resources like solar, wind, and hydro present opportunities to power the continent and address energy poverty.

In fact, many of the African countries with least access to electricity have the highest share of renewable energy in their final energy consumption, which presents a potent opportunity for the rollout of renewable energy on the continent.

According to the global SDG database the African continent is demonstrating strong leadership in renewable energy, with 55.5 per cent of its total final energy consumption coming from renewable sources, outpacing major regions like Europe at 15.3%, Northern America at 12.4%, and Asia at 16.8% in 2021.

With the continent in possession of 30 per cent of the world’s essential minerals for renewable technologies and 60 per cent of the world’s best solar resources, this exhibits enormous potential to fuel its future growth with clean energy. COP30 ought to put at the front a climate change fight for Africa, because Africa’s contribution to global warming is absolutely minimal.

Energy İnvestments

Reports from multiple sources suggest that Africa received a disproportionately small share of only 2 per cent of global renewable energy investments in the last decade, far below what’s needed to accelerate change.

With shifting donor priorities, the continent should transform climate finance from waiting for charity, to strategic investment, use the abundant sunshine it has, hydropower, geothermal, wind and the critical minerals beneath its soils to drive its own progress.

Advancing African-led financial instruments, including the African Development Bank’s green bonds and regional climate resilient innovation hubs is more crucial than ever before.

In the same spirit African leaders and financial institutions recently backed the Africa Green Industrialization Initiative (AGII) with $100 billion pledge from a range of development and commercial banks to support renewable energy projects and new green industry sectors, as well as pledging to mobilize at least $50 billion annually in catalytic finance to deliver 1,000 solutions for climate challenges in energy, food security, fragile ecosystems, transport and resilience by 2030, such momentum ought to be sustained.

African governments should use COP30 to press on to advance their bold climate commitments, that responds to the needs of the communities.

In spite of the United States' withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement, a new generation of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement are due to be submitted ahead of COP30 in Belem, Brazil. African leaders have an opportunity to participate in the development of these NDCs and to demonstrate that adaptation and resilience are not optional, but inevitable.