The African Climate Business Plan – to be presented at COP21 or the Paris climate change conference starting November 30 – seeks to address threats such as more frequent droughts, increasing malaria risks, and food price hikes.
Powering resilience: which involves helping the continent increase low-carbon energy sources, given that societies with deficient energy sources are more severely affected by climate shocks.
The World Bank and the United Nations Environment Programme estimate that the cost of managing climate resilience will continue to rise to 20 to 50 billion dollars by mid-century, and closer to 100 billion dollars in the event of a four degrees centigrade warming.
The World Bank Group is calling for $16 billion in funding in a new plan to help African people and countries adapt to climate change and build up the continent’s resilience to climate shocks, and one third of the funds are expected to come from the Bank’s fund for the poorest countries.
Africa, which contributes the least to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, suffers the most from the impact of climate change, including the devastating effects of extreme weather patterns that damage infrastructure and ravage crops, the bank said. “In light of the huge financing gap and the need for urgent action, the World Bank prepared the Africa Climate Business Plan as an important step in mobilizing climate finance to fast-track Africa’s climate adaptation needs in the context of development priorities”.
“The key finding of the report is that climate change represents a significant obstacle to the sustained eradication of poverty”, the report notes.
Enabling resilience: by providing the required data and decision-making tools for promoting climate-resilient development across all sectors through fortifying hydro-met systems at both national and regional levels, through building the capacity to plan and design investments focused on climate-resilience. The World Bank said it still needs to mobilise another $2 billion to reach its target. “We look forward to working with African governments and development partners, including the private sector, to move this plan forward and deliver climate smart development”.
The plan warns that unless decisive action is taken, climate variability and change could seriously jeopardize the region’s hard-won development gains and its aspirations for further growth and poverty reduction.
“Any African leader will tell you that they’ve had very little role putting the carbon in the air”, Kim said Tuesday, according to Bloomberg, adding: “But they’ve suffered most from the impact of climate change”.
Source: voicechronicle
