Africa Climate Action Priorities- Low Hanging Fruits

Africa is a net positive continent. It currently holds up to 17% of the global population but accounts for about 4% - 6% of total global emissions. By 2050, the continent will account for a higher proportion of the global population but increase emissions only to about 10%. However, the key is that the continent, while being least responsible for the changing climate, is most disproportionately afflicted by the changing climate. This is because of an extremely low socioeconomic base to start with. What this implies is that climate action, through the implementation of the NDCs, must be focused on limiting emissions and enhancing environmental resilience and unlocking inclusive socioeconomic opportunities. And by this, ensure equity and justice in transitioning economies to a low emissions development pathway that creates opportunities for all.

The following aspect are low-hanging fruits to drive climate action transformation development.

a) nature-based solutions: up to 56% of Africa’s emissions are land-based, driven by deforestation for fuel wood and clearing land for farming, among other causes. At the same time, conventional farming approaches of expanding land, agro-chemicals, and chemical fertilizer use further degrade biodiversity in agroecosystems and lay the basis for risk factors like pollution, and antimicrobial resistance, among others. Prioritizing NDC implementation actions to transition communities to clean cooking solutions – especially waste recovery to biogas/fuel briquettes, as well as nature-based, climate-smart agriculture approaches, are key nature-based solutions areas that can go a long way in addressing these risk factors while restoring ecosystems. Case studies of these and critical success factors at policy, finance, and operational levels will go a long way to shift the needle of implementation forward.

?b) Translation of NDCs into implementation investments: NDCs are simultaneously a socioeconomic development tool. Consequently, we need to formulate investment actions for NDCs implementation to simultaneously prioritize key NDCs implementation areas that the majority of players in African economies can focus on – especially the informal sector. Translating NDCs into investments needs to create an enabling environment through which all key players in an economy, especially the informal sector in Africa, can be incentivized to take actions that implement NDC priorities of countries from an enterprising lens.

c) Energy transition: In actualizing a just transition, energy transition goes beyond controlling emissions and covers ensuring affordable, appropriate, clean, renewable energy for both cooking and electrification to power domestic and enterprise purposes. To this end, some key aspects that need to be considered include:

- transitioning communities from unclean cooking (charcoal, firewood) to clean, accessible, renewable energy sources of waste recovery to biogas & fuel briquettes. Investment models and success stories of these need to be shown,

- leveraging off-grid solutions to electrify off-grid areas. It is reported that off-grid solutions, especially solar mini-grids, are the most affordable way of electrifying off-grid areas. The cost of extending the grid to connect power in distant off-grid areas of rural Africa is up to 4.6times higher than making the grid connection to a user that is close to the grid, which is users in urban areas.

- prioritize energy investments beyond lighting to include powering value-added enterprises in key inclusive sectors like agriculture. It is worth noting that electrification is mainly looked at from the “lighting” dimension. But of more need is the ability to power value-added enterprise actions that generate income opportunities to address the socioeconomic sources of vulnerability and also ensure beneficiaries have the needed liquidity to maintain the electrification services.??

- diversity of clean, renewable solutions in Africa must be optimally tapped through energy trade & clean energy power pools. Clean, renewable energy resources are not universally available across Africa. Different regions specialize in different sources. For example, wind is prevalent in coast lines of Southern and North Africa. Geothermal is prevalent is Eastern Africa. Hydro is prevalent in Central Africa and East Africa. Solar on the other hand is common across Africa. To this end, for these resources to be optimally available to power clean energy transition across Africa, we need regional power pools specialized in the different sources, trading with each other to enable countries to be able to create clean energy mixes that draw from different clean sources from the different clean energy regional power pools.

d) inclusion, especially of youth & informal sector: the key is the creation of dedicated and targeted incentives – be it fiscal through lowering the cost of credit, training & capacity enhancement - for youth and informal sector actors to enable them to engage in enterprise actions that drive implementation of the NDC priority areas.