Back in 2009, the world’s wealthier nations pledged to mobilise US$100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing countries cope with climate change. The funding would be used to adapt to the impacts of climate change and reduce or prevent emissions.
The world’s poorest countries are expected to be hit hardest by climate change extremes such as droughts, floods and cyclones. And African countries are among the most vulnerable to those impacts on food security, health, economies and ecosystems. For example, crop yield loss projections are larger for tropical regions of Africa. And poorer populations in sub-Saharan Africa are at highest risk of malnutrition.
At the same time, Africa’s contributions to greenhouse gas emissions causing global warming are among the lowest globally. Without financial support, climate change is projected to push tens of millions more Africans into extreme poverty by 2030.
Our new research, based on data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), tracked funding for adaptation to African nations from 2014 to 2018. The funding came from governments in wealthy countries and development banks. The work is important as there has been no extensive mapping of climate finance to Africa to date.
We identified five ways in which finance for adaptation to climate change in Africa falls short. These are: quantity; variation among countries; neglect of some sectors; difficulty spending funds and debt.
Adaptation finance doesn’t match the needs
Roughly US$5 per year, per person. That’s what adaptation funding to each African amounted to between 2014 and 2018, at a grand total of less than US$5.5 billion per year.
African governments estimate that they need at least US$7.4 billion per year by 2020. They also expect that they will need much more as the world gets ever hotter – reaching tens of billions of dollars per year by 2050.
It’s clear that the world’s poorest countries will be hit hardest by climate hazards and extreme weather events. The World Bank estimates that sub-Saharan Africa will face the highest adaptation costs per unit of gross domestic product (GDP). This is because of lower GDPs and higher costs of adaptation for water resources, due to changes in precipitation patterns.
But we found that funding from 2014 to 2018 targeting adaptation (US$16.5 billion) was only about half of the funding aimed at reducing emissions (mitigation), which was US$30.6 billion. While finance for mitigation is important because it addresses the root cause of climate change, for African countries that already face severe climate impacts, increased funding for adaptation is urgent.
Some countries are more vulnerable than others
Funders haven’t strategically targeted adaptation finance to the most vulnerable African countries. Per capita funding levels are almost the same for least-developed and more developed countries.
Generally, least-developed countries are also more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. Niger, Somalia, Chad, Sudan and Liberia rank among the most vulnerable countries in the world. Yet they receive less than US$5 per person per year to adapt to weather extremes.
Not all sectors in need receive adaptation finance
Only two sectors, agriculture and water supply & sanitation, received half of the adaptation-related funding. To some extent this aligns with the expected vulnerability and exposure of these sectors to climate impacts. Also, African governments prioritise these sectors in their climate plans.
But money also needs to go to sectors such as education, health and biodiversity and have gender equality as a main objective. Healthy, educated people are more resilient to climate shocks, both socially and economically. And healthy natural ecosystems reduce direct and indirect climate risks. Funded programmes that empower women and take into account the unique needs and priorities of both women and men are found to be more effective.
Unspent adaptation finance
We need to ensure that funding is doing what it set out to do once it reaches poor countries, instead of having negative impacts as some literature suggests. But our research shows that most of it doesn’t even reach countries. Only 46% of adaptation finance committed to Africa was actually disbursed.
By contrast, finance for reducing greenhouse gas emissions was being spent at a rate of 56%. And 96% of overall development finance that funders committed to Africa over the same period was actually spent.
This suggests some major barriers to spending on climate projects, particularly for adaptation projects. Literature that has looked at this problem in more detail suggests that administrations in less developed countries are often not set up to properly plan procurement. They often have to comply with strict funding conditions and guidelines, find counterpart funding within the time that’s agreed, or comply with rigid rules of multilateral climate funds.
Adaptation finance leads to more debt
More adaptation related finance was provided as loans (57%) than as grants (42%). Poor and often highly indebted countries are largely expected to pay back money for adapting to climate hazards they’ve done very little to cause.
Aside from climate justice, on a practical level, grant-based finance has higher disbursement rates than loans. Adaptation finance could make a bigger difference if more of it was provided in the form of grants.
Looking ahead
Climate finance is probably the biggest key – or obstacle – to success at the upcoming UN climate conference COP26 in Glasgow in 2021. The OECD has found that the promise of $100 billion per year for developing nations by 2020 has fallen short by $20 billion.
But our research suggests that climate finance is about more than just one aggregate number. The money must match the needs, in terms of amount and purpose. It must go to all the sectors where it’s needed to put people in a better position to deal with the impacts of climate change.
Funders and recipients must identify and solve the problems preventing money from actually making a difference on the ground. And funders must reconsider the quality of the finance, especially whether it’s provided in a just and effective form.
Georgia Savvidou is a PhD candidate , Chalmers University of Technology
The theme of this year’s Earth Day is “Planet vs. Plastics” – a theme chosen to raise awareness of the damage done by plastic to humans, animals and the planet and to promote policies aiming to reduce global plastic production by 60 percent by 2040.
As our chart shows, global plastics use has increased rapidly over the past few decades, growing 250 percent since 1990 to reach 460 million tonnes in 2019, according to the OECD’s Global Plastics Outlook, which projects another 67-percent increase in global plastics use by 2040 and for the world’s annual plastic use to exceed one billion tonnes by 2052. As our chart shows, packaging is the largest driver of global plastics use, which is why a rapid phasing out of all single use plastics by 2030 is one of the policy measures proposed under EARTHDAY.ORG’s 60X40 framework.
Other major applications of plastics include building and construction, transportation as well as textiles, with the fast fashion industry particularly guilty of adding to the world’s plastic footprint. “The fast fashion industry annually produces over 100 billion garments,” the Earth Day organizers write. “Overproduction and overconsumption have transformed the industry, leading to the disposability of fashion. People now buy 60 percent more clothing than 15 years ago, but each item is kept for only half as long.” Most importantly, the organization points out that 85 percent of disposed garments end up in landfills or incinerators, while just 1 percent are being recycled.
Felix Richter is a Data Journalist
This article was first published in the Statista.com.
Algeria’s Tassili N’Ajjer plateau is Africa’s largest national park. Among its vast sandstone formations is perhaps the world’s largest art museum. Over 15,000 etchings and paintings are exhibited there, some as much as 11,000 years old according to scientific dating techniques, representing a unique ethnological and climatological record of the region.
Curiously, however, these images do not depict the arid, barren landscape that is present in the Tassili N’Ajjer today. Instead, they portray a vibrant savannah inhabited by elephants, giraffes, rhinos and hippos. This rock art is an important record of the past environmental conditions that prevailed in the Sahara, the world’s largest hot desert.
These images depict a period approximately 6,000-11,000 years ago called the Green Sahara or North African Humid Period. There is widespread climatological evidence that during this period the Sahara supported wooded savannah ecosystems and numerous rivers and lakes in what are now Libya, Niger, Chad and Mali.
This greening of the Sahara didn’t happen once. Using marine and lake sediments, scientists have identified over 230 of these greenings occurring about every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. These greening events provided vegetated corridors which influenced species’ distribution and evolution, including the out-of-Africa migrations of ancient humans.
These dramatic greenings would have required a large-scale reorganisation of the atmospheric system to bring rains to this hyper arid region. But most climate models haven’t been able to simulate how dramatic these events were.
As a team of climate modellers and anthropologists, we have overcome this obstacle. We developed a climate model that more accurately simulates atmospheric circulation over the Sahara and the impacts of vegetation on rainfall.
We identified why north Africa greened approximately every 21,000 years over the past eight million years. It was caused by changes in the Earth’s orbital precession – the slight wobbling of the planet while rotating. This moves the Northern Hemisphere closer to the sun during the summer months.
This caused warmer summers in the Northern Hemisphere, and warmer air is able to hold more moisture. This intensified the strength of the West African Monsoon system and shifted the African rainbelt northwards. This increased Saharan rainfall, resulting in the spread of savannah and wooded grassland across the desert from the tropics to the Mediterranean, providing a vast habitat for plants and animals.
Our results demonstrate the sensitivity of the Sahara Desert to changes in past climate. They explain how this sensitivity affects rainfall across north Africa. This is important for understanding the implications of present-day climate change (driven by human activities). Warmer temperatures in the future may also enhance monsoon strength, with both local and global impacts.
Earth’s changing orbit
The fact that the wetter periods in north Africa have recurred every 21,000 years or so is a big clue about what causes them: variations in Earth’s orbit. Due to gravitational influences from the moon and other planets in our solar system, the orbit of the Earth around the sun is not constant. It has cyclic variations on multi-thousand year timescales. These orbital cycles are termed Milankovitch cycles; they influence the amount of energy the Earth receives from the sun.
On 100,000-year cycles, the shape of Earth’s orbit (or eccentricity) shifts between circular and oval, and on 41,000 year cycles the tilt of Earth’s axis varies (termed obliquity). Eccentricity and obliquity cycles are responsible for driving the ice ages of the past 2.4 million years.
The third Milankovitch cycle is precession. This concerns Earth’s wobble on its axis, which varies on a 21,000 year timescale. The similarity between the precession cycle and the timing of the humid periods indicates that precession is their dominant driver. Precession influences seasonal contrasts, increasing them in one hemisphere and reducing them in another. During warmer Northern Hemisphere summers, a consequent increase in north African summer rainfall would have initiated a humid phase, resulting in the spread of vegetation across the region.
Eccentricity and the ice sheets
In our study we also identified that the humid periods did not occur during the ice ages, when large glacial ice sheets covered much of the polar regions. This is because these vast ice sheets cooled the atmosphere. The cooling countered the influence of precession and suppressed the expansion of the African monsoon system.
The ice ages are driven by the eccentricity cycle, which determines how circular Earth’s orbit is around the sun. So our findings show that eccentricity indirectly influences the magnitude of the humid periods via its influence on the ice sheets. This highlights, for the first time, a major connection between these distant high latitude and tropical regions.
The Sahara acts as a gate. It controls the dispersal of species between north and sub-Saharan Africa, and in and out of the continent. The gate was open when the Sahara was green and closed when deserts prevailed. Our results reveal the sensitivity of this gate to Earth’s orbit around the sun. They also show that high latitude ice sheets may have restricted the dispersal of species during the glacial periods of the last 800,000 years.
Our ability to model the African humid periods helps us understand the alternation of humid and arid phases. This had major consequences for the dispersal and evolution of species, including humans, within and out of Africa. Furthermore, it provides a tool for understanding future greening in response to climate change and its environmental impact.
Refined models may, in the future, be able to identify how climate warming will influence rainfall and vegetation in the Sahara region, and the wider implications for society.
Edward Armstrong is a postdoctoral research fellow, University of Helsinki
A new draft text on global stocktake has been published at the UN climate summit, COP28 UAE, on Wednesday morning. While the draft text does not contain the words “phase out”, it includes reference to transitioning away from all fossil fuels to enable the world to reach net zero by 2050.
The text published by the UN’s climate body calls on parties to accelerate and substantially reduce non-carbon dioxide emissions worldwide with a focus on reducing methane emissions by 2030. “We all want to get the most ambitious outcome possible,” Majid Al Suwaidi, COP28 Director-General, said on Tuesday.
The text, published early Wednesday, does not specifically refer to oil, but mentions the need to ‘phase-down’ coal. It says that it recognises the need for ‘deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in line with 1.5C pathways and calls on Parties to contribute to global efforts.
Among those efforts it recognises the need to triple renewable energy capacity by 2030 and doubling the annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by the same date. It also recognises the need to accelerate the phase-down of coal and accelerate towards net zero energy systems, utilising zero or low carbon fuels by mid century.
While the document does not mention oil or combustion engines, it does recognises the need for accelerating the reduction of emissions from road transport on a range of pathways, including through development of infrastructure and rapid deployment of zero and low-emission vehicles. It also recognises the need to phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies that do not address energy poverty or just transitions, as soon as possible.
Finance specifics
On the subject of finance, the document said developed countries should continue to take the lead in mobilising climate finance from a wide variety of sources, instruments and channels, noting the significant role of public funds, through a variety of actions, including supporting country-driven strategies, and taking into account the needs and priorities of developing countries.
Such mobilisation of climate finance should represent a progression beyond previous efforts, the text said. It may provide small comfort to campaigners from developing countries who implored Parties to begin the phase out of fossil fuels and provide vastly improved access to funding for renewables.
The document highlights the persistent gap and challenges in technology development and transfer and the uneven pace of adoption of climate technologies around the world.
It further urges Parties to address these barriers and strengthen cooperative action, including with non-Party stakeholders, particularly with the private sector, to rapidly scale up the deployment of existing technologies, the fostering of innovation and the development and transfer of new technologies.
It also emphasizes the ongoing challenges faced by many developing country Parties in accessing climate finance and encourages further efforts, including by the operating entities of the Financial Mechanism, to simplify access to such finance, in particular for those developing country Parties that have significant capacity constraints, such as the least developed countries and small island developing States.
