Unified African voice needed at COP29

Climate and development finance for African countries must come in the form of grants and loans, and related debts must be cancelled, said Fadhel Kaboub, a senior adviser at think tank Power Shift Africa. 

The format of loans and deals with little benefit for Africa is absurd, Kaboub told the Mail & Guardian on the sidelines of the COP29 conference in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The stalemate in negotiations on finance to help developing countries has left many participants frustrated at the annual United Nations Climate Change Conference.

Kaboub said countries in the Global North are exceeding their carbon budgets and are in climate debt.

Climate debt refers to the cumulative negative effects of carbon dioxide emissions, whose costs are imposed without compensation. 

Kaboub said the concept of climate finance in its current form is that countries in the Global North — the worst climate polluters — have huge climate debt, which they repay in tranches. But that money comes with micromanagement, rules and policies that effectively benefit the polluter.

“If someone owes you $100 they must pay you $100, even if it is a negotiated payment plan. But at the end of the day you need to receive your money. Climate debt, however and more specifically climate finance works differently,” he said. 

“Instead of me giving you $100 I give you $3 and I tell you what to do with it, and then I lend you $7 and tell you what to do with it and impose restrictions and micro-manage your policy choices.”

“Climate change was not something that we [African countries] caused. We just pay for the cost of it,” he said.

He said what was needed was the transfer of life saving technologies to manufacture and deploy the building blocks of climate resilience and adaptation, starting with renewable energy, clean cooking and clean transportation infrastructure to build the logistics of resilience.

Based on quantifiable science, sub-Saharan Africa alone should be paid $45 trillion worth of climate debt, Kaboub added.

Early on in the COP negotiations, an agreement was reached on strong standards for a centralised carbon market under the UN. 

UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell said last week: “When operational, these carbon markets will help countries implement their climate plans faster and cheaper, driving down emissions. We are a long way from halving emissions this decade, but wins on carbon markets here at COP29 will help us get back in that race.” 

Although this was hailed by many as a win, Kaboub didn’t share the sentiment.

“The way carbon markets work is you have a historic polluter in the Global North who is not able or willing to decarbonise, who is going to continue their emissions, but they’re going to buy a pollution permit to offset their emissions. This happens in an African country, say Kenya, for example, designating one of its forests as a carbon sink,” he said.

“And once you do that, to offset the pollution from somebody in the Global North, that carbon forest is now carbon market territory, so it needs to be protected — protected from its own custodians, the native people who live there, who didn’t cause climate change, who now need to be pushed out of their ancestral land, their pastoral land, so that that forest can be designated as a carbon territory.”

He said the major problem is that the forests store the carbon and in the event of things like forest fires, made more likely by climate change, “all the carbon is released back into the atmosphere. So this is not a climate solution, and it’s not even a climate finance solution,” he said.

The notion of Africa as a carbon territory is simply green colonialism, he said.

For the current climate talks and the remaining days of COP29 to be a success for Africa, it is important that the continent be united as one voice, Kaboub said. “It is clear that these negotiations are about power. Africa has the moral argument, the science and the facts on our side but not the political leverage.” 

To shift that narrative, it is crucial for the continent to work with different blocks on a unified position and remain resolute in its arguments and negotiating. 

“We [would] rather have no deal than a bad one,” Kaboub said, adding that uniting with small island countries and Arab groups would strengthen the African voice and position. The money needed is Africa’s right and not a charity, he stressed.

“It’s like somebody walks into your house, breaks all your furniture, breaks your legs, destroys your livelihood, and then you go to court and you tell the judge what happened. You have the evidence and everything. You’re not supposed to beg to borrow money from the person who destroyed your house, with interest. You’re not supposed to beg and invite that person to come take your forest, right? So you can have justice, you have a legitimate right,” he said.

One way to leverage power, he said, was to withhold important resources that developed countries need for their industrialisation, such as critical minerals — meaning African countries could negotiate for technology transfer.

Kaboub said just transition partnerships — such as South Africa’s — served to divide developing countries and separate them from their blocks. He urged leaders to beware of initiatives such as the carbon border adjustment mechanism — a tax on products with high carbon coming into the European Union or the United Kingdom.