A significant but little reported event occurred last Thursday. The Africa Partnership Forum held a Special Session on Climate Change on 3 September 2009 at the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) Headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The purpose of the event was to agree a common negotiating platform for Africa focused on Africa’s concerns and expectations in the run up to the Copenhagen Climate Change to be held in December 2009.
The meeting was attended by ten African Heads of State and assorted ministers, regional institutions such as UNECA, the New Economic Partnership for African Development (NEPAD) and the African Union. The Joint Statement is worth reading. It will be transmitted to the UN High Level event on 22 September, the G20 Summit at Pittsburgh and other processes.
This meeting laid out the key elements of Africa’s negotiating positions at Copenhagen. They are as follows:
1) Financing – The basic premise for Africa’s demands at Copenhagen is the recognition that historic responsibility for climate change lies with developed countries, that climate change poses additional costs to development, and therefore that African countries should be compensated and assisted in responding to it.
– An African Union proposal that is taking shape puts the price tag at $67 billion and $200 billion annually in compensation. Note that this is far higher than Sir Nicholas Stern’s estimate of $30 billion per annum that Africa will need to meet the costs of adaptation ($20 billion) and mitigation ($10 billion);
– The AU further specifies that scaled up funds should be new, additional (to ODA), adequate, predictable and sustainable;
– There is a shared concern that Africa has been largely excluded from the existing financial and technology cooperation mechanisms (e.g. the Clean Development Mechanism). The AU argues for a coherent financial architecture for climate change, with equitable governance and simplified access procedures.
2) Adaptation – Africa will be strongly arguing for the need of a legally binding commitment and comprehensive climate change adaptation framework that is regularly monitored and reported to the UNFCCC Secretariat.
3) Mitigation – Africa will push for ambitious and binding greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reduction targets from developed countries. The targets mentioned so far are: a reduction of 40% by 2020, and 80-95% by 2050 (both from a 1990 baseline). Developing countries should have no binding targets to cut emissions.
4) Technology transfer – African negotiators are calling for a revision of the global Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) regime, which is seen as a barrier to local development and diffusion of the technologies needed to adapt to and or mitigate the effects of climate change. Developed countries should pay for technology transfers.
This is a remarkable development. Until just a few years ago, individual countries were passively if at all involved and there was no unified African voice on climate change. The lack of a coordinated stance has placed serious limitations on Africa’s ability to negotiate in the past. As a result, Africa has benefited the least from the current climate regime: only around 2% of all CDM projects are in Africa and most of these are in South Africa.
Much has been made of Africa’s seemingly astronomical compensation demands (which may range from $67bn to $200bn). Incidentally, this is far higher than Sir Nicholas Stern’s estimate of $30 billion per annum that Africa will need to meet the costs of adaptation ($20 billion) and mitigation ($10 billion). However, this is the wrong headline. Zenawi stressed that Africa’s primary objective is not to seek compensation, rather to avoid catastrophic damage in the first place. Therefore Africa will seek a binding commitment to overall emissions reductions consistent with a two degree Celsius increase in global temperatures by the end of the century.
In the words of Prime Minister Zenawi, Africa is determined to participate fully and constructively in the Copenhagen negotiations as ‘responsible actors and negotiators’. This should be seen as a welcome development. Having over 50 countries (i.e. over a quarter of all countries participating) speak with one voice will greatly contribute to making the negotiations more manageable. But Africa’s voice will also add pressure to reach an ambitious and developmentally-oriented deal.
