Summary

COP26 concluded with the pomp to which the world has become accustomed as the 197 parties agreed to the ‘Glasgow Climate Pact’, likely to stimulate intense debate right up until COP27, in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.  The package of decisions comprises a range of items, including strengthened efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions and to come back to Egypt with more ambitious emissions reductions targets – ones that aim to limit global warming to under 1.5°C, closing the gap to the current trajectory of 2.4°C.  The Glasgow Climate Pact also reaffirmed the responsibility of developed countries to fulfil their pledge of providing $100 billion per year to developing countries. Further promises were made to support climate vulnerable countries through the adaptation fund as they adapt to the dangerous and costly impacts of climate change. In an unprecedented move, countries were called upon to phase down unabated coal power and inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels. Beyond the Glasgow Climate Pact, a number of deals were made on methane, deforestation and aligning the finance sector with net-zero targets by 2050.

The summit took place in the shadow of an extraordinary two years and amid a pandemic that has wreaked havoc on livelihoods and economies worldwide. There were a number of worrying trends on the climate front: The year 2021 was the 6th warmest year on record and 2015 to 2021 were the seven warmest years on record. In August 2021, the IPCC’s 6th Assessment Report delivered its starkest warning to the world that ‘many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, and that some of the impacts were now inevitable and irreversible over hundreds to thousands of years. This warning highlights how climate change is no longer a theoretical, far-off risk but a phenomenon with which people in different parts of the world are already grappling, with compounding effects that became even more visible in 2021’.

What did Africa accomplish in the COP26?

While climate change is now accepted as a collective action problem, countries tend to see global issues through the prism of their own national realities. Climate impacts and therefore responses are national and local in character. The African Group of Climate Negotiators (AGN) came with a suite of negotiating positions to Glasgow.

Adaptation

Adaptation is a key priority for Africa as the continent is already experiencing the worst impact of the climate crisis. Adaptation refers to adjustments in ecological, social, or economic systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli and their impacts. Parties to the UNFCCC and its Paris Agreement recognize that adaptation is a key component of the long-term global response to climate change to protect people, livelihoods and ecosystems. Its implementation requires elaborate planning. To date, agreeing on enhanced financing for adaptation has been problematic. The Glasgow Climate Pact urged parties to further integrate adaptation into local, national and regional planning and for developed countries to double their collective provision of climate finance for adaptation, taking it from the current 25% to the envisaged 50% share of global climate finance - against the target of $100 billion. Prior to Glasgow, the AGN had also negotiated advancing the operationalization of the Global Goal of Adaptation (GGA). The next steps of those negotiations were, unfortunately, not taken at COP26, and an opportunity was missed to fully operationalize the GGA. However, some modest success was achieved with the launch of the two-year Glasgow-Sharm el-Sheik Work Programme on the GGA.

Loss and Damage

Small island states and climate vulnerable countries, many in Africa, have been calling for funding to pay for “loss and damage”. The term loss and damage is used in the UNFCCC process to refer to harms caused by anthropogenic climate change, which include harms resulting from onset events, such as floods and cyclones as well as slow-onset processes, such as sea level rise. At the heart of the debate is how these losses and damages could be paid for and who should pay. Some experts view loss and damage as a ‘compensation’ or ‘solidarity fund’ from developed countries for their ‘responsibility’ regarding greenhouse gas emissions. The African group took the position that compensation for loss and damage is necessary to prevent loss of livelihoods, homes and cultural heritage.

In the end, in spite of all the expressions of goodwill at the summit, the G77 and China proposal for establishing a facility dedicated to investigating this topic was not included in the Glasgow Climate Pact. This was a bitter disappointment to many vulnerable countries - including ones in Africa. Once again, it underlined the clear North-South divide on this issue and the unwillingness of developed countries to link their historical responsibility with compensatory finance to support vulnerable nations take resilience-building measures.

However, there were also reasons for optimism. Firstly, Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, broke ranks to pledge £2 million for loss and damage as an ‘act of reparation’, challenging the resistance of richer nations and opening up the conversation that issues of liability and responsibility have pushed to the surface.  Secondly, the operationalization of the Santiago Network for Loss and Damage (SNLD) was a lingering issue viewed by the AGN as a key area needing to be resolved. The SNLD was established at COP25 to catalyze technical assistance for averting, minimizing and addressing loss and damage in vulnerable developing countries, but its functions and modalities were not fixed. At COP26, parties elaborated on the SNLD functions and a process was set out for developing its institutional arrangements with the view to fully operationalizing the SNLD by COP27. Plenty of work therefore awaits African governments to create the platform for engaging a wide range of stakeholders and ensuring a fair, transparent outcome.

Mitigation

The way in which mitigation is handled in the UNFCCC process is of profound interest for Africa. While Africa might not have contributed to past and present emissions and has little to mitigate at present, the continent cannot remain a passive observer in the drama of negotiations on emissions reductions since also its future is at stake. Even if some 70% of the carbon budget has been used up, Africa must become an active player in deciding how to manage the remaining carbon budget.

As it unfolded in Glasgow, the Glasgow Climate Pact represents incremental progress and not the breakthrough moment needed to bring the 1.5°C life support. Before COP26, the world was on a pathway towards 2.7°C of warming, based on countries’ NDC commitments, expectations of technological change and, in small measure, demand reduction.  The COP26 announcements of some countries would lead to a pathway of global warming decreasing from 2.7 to 2.4°C. Net-zero emission statements were also heard from a range of countries, such as India and Nigeria.  Countries were told to come back with more ambitious NDCs for COP27. One key highlight was the announcement of a huge deal to help South Africa phase out coal, which would include resources to support affected workers, rehabilitate degraded ecosystems and build capacity for clean energy transition.

Market and non-market mechanisms

The issue of market and non-market approaches has implications for Africa. In the run-up to COP26, the AGN placed great importance in ensuring environmental integrity and avoiding double counting. More specifically, it argued that agreement needed to be reached in ensuring that the share of the carbon trading proceeds covered in Article 6 goes to an Adaptation Fund without limiting that share to Art. 6.4, an agreement that would have doubled the Fund’s carbon trading income from 5% to 10% of its total budget.  Following a tortuous series of negotiations over Article 6, as related to trading carbon, an agreement was finally reached, albeit with the limit of only Art. 6.4 payments being mandatory. Even though some of the major loopholes appear to have been closed, much stricter rules will still be needed to prevent the fossil fuel industry from claiming “carbon offsets” and carrying on business as usual. To this end, Africa needs to be vigilant against being used as a dumping ground for offsets on the cheap.

Finance

This is where the rubber hits the road. Climate finance has always been one of the most contentious topics in the UNFCCC process. Remember, developed countries originally committed to mobilizing US$100 billion per year in 2009. And they reaffirmed their commitment as part of the Paris Agreement in 2015 with the intention to provide financing in full by 2020, sustaining it through to 2025. That target has never been met, and the US$100 billion continues to be aspirational, even though the AGN indicated that Africa needed an estimated support of over US$ 3 trillion to implement its climate action commitments and NDCs.

In Glasgow, the G77 + China called on developed countries to mobilize at least US$1.3 trillion per year by 2030, with a balance of a 50/50 split between adaptation and mitigation and at least US$100 billion in grant funding. There was no major breakthrough on the US$100 billion issue at COP26. The Glasgow Climate Pact noted its ‘regret’ that the developed countries were not able to mobilize the money, gently urging them to ‘fully deliver on the US$100 billion goal urgently and through to 2025’.

Despite the Climate Pact’s emphasis on ‘grants’ and ‘highly concessional forms of finance’, in all likelihood, a large share of the finance for developing countries will be loans. An OECD study had indicated that loans represented 71% of public climate finance in 2019.  Heavy dependence on loans has implications for the finances of countries in Africa as loans increase debt vulnerability, raising the question of why African countries should be saddled with loan repayments and interest to finance their climate actions. Fairness in accessing ‘cheap’ finance should be an important topic of debate this November when the parties meet in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt.

What needs to be done for COP27

COP26 provides an important springboard to achieve higher level ambitions in the Africa COP this November. However, much work awaits the African group, both on substance and on diplomatic fronts.

Firstly, Africa needs to frame the climate issue in terms of contributions to its sustainable development aspirations. Part of the task here is setting its own agenda for more ambitious development scenarios. The debate around financing for adaptation, loss and damage and mitigation is critical, and Africa needs to play a proactive role in getting the best possible deal in Egypt. But the task is more than preparing for each COP. The mission must involve creating the institutions and policies that support inclusive structural transformation across sectors. For example, on the question of energy, there is no doubt that Africa will need to close the energy access gap, but it’s also about what spillovers can be garnered on this important journey. Can Africa afford to be an importer of renewable technologies while supplying minerals such as cobalt and lithium critical for the global energy transition? It would be tragic to see global decarbonization happening at the expense of livelihoods in Africa. Hence, the continent’s policy makers need to think strategically about how they can situate their countries to share the benefits from climate action in ways that boost manufacturing and create employment in the process. Negotiating for climate finance is important, but more policy imagination will be needed to integrate climate co-benefits into development plans and aspirations.

Secondly, adaptation must be separated from loss and damage. They are different. They should be treated individually. Adaptation is about preventing climate change from wreaking havoc on livelihoods and is therefore future facing; loss and damage is about past damages attributed to climate change and thus sees ‘compensation’ as the way forward so that affected communities can rebuild their lives. African policy makers and negotiators must fight for more adaptation funding but must simultaneously prepare a stronger narrative on loss and damage, backed by robust research and centered in climate justice in support of those least responsible for climate change yet who have already experienced irreparable losses and damages.

Thirdly, on finance, Africa needs to make a strong case that the current finance mechanism/architecture for accessing finance is not meeting Africa’s needs. African countries receive a tiny proportion of the flows from both the public and the private sector, and with the growing dominance of private finance as a source of investment in climate action, this picture is not expected to improve. African countries are seen as high-risk destinations for private finance, preventing their ability to access ‘cheap’ finance from the capital market.  No question, countries need to develop clearer policies and strengthen their public institutions, but an equally important challenge is to adapt the structure of the current institutional architecture to the particular hurdles that African countries face. In the absence of ways to bridge this divide, countries are likely to make choices that may end up forcing them into a higher carbon trajectory.

For example, a number of countries in Africa have recently discovered significant fossil fuel reserves. Coercing them to leave these resources under the ground without incentives to move in the low carbon direction cannot be a solution. The uncomfortable truth around equity claims is real for many countries, with some of the poorest and most vulnerable communities living across Africa.  When countries are struggling to meet energy access domestically, and faced with the possibility of raising revenues by digging out their fossil reserves, the argument about ‘stranded assets’, quite frankly, does not add up. More effort must be put into ensuring that African countries are not disadvantaged because the rules around investment risk and their higher ‘credit risk rating’ perpetuate inequalities of access to climate finance.

Finally, On NDCs, the Glasgow Climate Pact requested countries to revisit and strengthen their NDCs ‘as necessary to align with the Paris Agreement temperature goal’ by the next COP in Egypt.  The truth is, African countries (bar South Africa) can do little to their NDCs that would make a dent on the 1.5°C target, given that their emissions are well below the temperature goals. Further, the COP process has no formal enforcement mechanism for those that miss their targets.  But African countries need to remind themselves that the temperature goals matter to their citizens’ livelihoods and should challenge less ambitious NDCs from high-emitting developed countries. The massive and continuing over-consumption of the global carbon budget has direct impacts in impoverishing people in Africa, many of whom are already poor.

Over the coming months, a sustained and smart campaign by African stakeholders, in coalition with others, is needed to highlight these structural inequalities, with the aim of pushing countries to go beyond lightly tweaking their NDCs. Moreover, developed countries need to come to COP27 in Egypt prepared to show a stronger performance on finance and constructive ways forward on loss and damage. After all, it’s the historical emissions that have led us to needing action on loss and damage.

The connections between unsustainable lifestyles in the North as a major contributor to climate change and unsustainable livelihoods caused by climate change in the South are real and must be confronted if we care about present and future generations.

About the Author

Yacob Mulugetta is a Professor of Energy and Development Policy at the University College London and a Fellow of the African Academy of Sciences (AAS). He is a founding member of the African Climate Policy Centre (ACPC) at the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) based in Ethiopia.). He has 25 years of research, teaching and advisory experience on the links between energy infrastructure provision and human welfare.