The second Africa Climate Summit wrapped up in Ethiopia with a bold assertion of the continent’s ability to chart a path to green growth with homegrown resources, but climate campaigners expressed disappointment that leaders had not swung behind the COP28 pledge to transition away from fossil fuels.
While a copy of the final declaration from the three-day summit in Addis Ababa had yet to be released a day after it ended, Ethiopian President Taye Atske Selassie told the closing ceremony on Wednesday that the summit had re-positioned Africa “not as victims of a crisis it never created but as a global centre for climate solutions, renewable energy and green growth”.
Selassie said it is an injustice that 600 million Africans live without electricity access, adding that the continent is no longer waiting for charity but will use the abundant sun it has and the critical minerals beneath its soils to drive its own progress.
According to a statement from the summit organisers, the leaders’ declaration calls for “strengthened and sustained support” to scale up African-led climate initiatives such as the 8,000-km Great Green Wall across the Sahel and the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative.
It also noted that the Africa Climate Innovation Compact (ACIC) and the African Climate Facility (ACF) had been set up to to mobilise $50 billion annually in catalytic finance to deliver “1,000 solutions” for climate challenges in energy, agriculture, water, transport and resilience by 2030.
To meet Africa’s clean energy goals, investors urged to tolerate higher risk
Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed described the new compact as a “bold, continent-wide partnership uniting our universities, research institutions, startups, rural communities and innovators”.
The announcement came after African financial institutions on Monday backed a green industrialisation initiative for the continent with $100 billion from a range of development and commercial banks to support renewable energy projects and new green industry sectors.
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Ethiopia’s preparedness puts it ahead of Nigeria in bid to host COP32, campaigners say
Ethiopia’s logistics, infrastructure and climate diplomacy make it seem better placed to host the 2027 UN climate talks than its West African rival – for now -
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Backing for “transitional energy sources” draws fire
Despite these major green growth programmes, civil society groups criticised the summit declaration for recognising “the role of transitional energy sources in ensuring a just transition that safeguards the energy security of developing countries”. On the other hand, it did not mention the COP28 promise to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems.
Activists said the wording leaves room for the use of fossil gas in Africa’s transition to a low-carbon, climate-resilient economy.
“Fossil gas is a false solution that cannot drive development agenda across the African continent,” said Dean Bhebhe, a senior advisor at think-tank Power Shift Africa. A path grounded in gas is not “just” because Africa “risks further trapping itself into a cycle of debt, wants, needs and fears in the African continent”, he added.
The Nairobi declaration from the first Africa Climate Summit in 2023 recognised the need to phase down unabated coal power and phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, but it is “disappointing” to see that those were not featured in the Addis decision while messaging on transitional fuel was sneaked in, Bhebhe added.
Ethiopia’s preparedness puts it ahead of Nigeria in bid to host COP32, campaigners say
Nafi Quarshie, Africa director at the Natural Resource Governance Institute (NRGI), said that despite the sufferings of oil and gas communities in parts of Africa and the realities of the transition, including pressure on local economies and livelihoods, “the declaration made no reference to these impacts”.
“African governments must now use COP30 to ensure that they move toward a just, orderly and equitable transition that responds to the needs of the communities behind every oil field,” she added.
International finance sought
In addition to the climate finance announced by African funders, the international community still has an obligation to provide support, said Richard Muyungi, chair of the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) at the UN climate talks.
The climate negotiator added that Africa’s demand “is not charity but our just rights under the [UN Climate] Convention and the Paris Agreement: adequate, accessible, and grant-based finance, alongside technology transfer and debt relief”.
Few pledges were made at the summit by donors, apart from Denmark announcing $79 million for supporting agricultural transformation and Italy reaffirming a commitment of $4.2 billion to the Italian Climate Fund, of which around 70% will be allocated to Africa.
Ahead of November’s COP30 climate summit, the Addis declaration highlighted an urgent need for new, innovative climate finance mechanisms adapted to Africa’s sustainable development priorities, including blended finance mechanisms, debt-for-climate project swaps and strategic public-private partnerships.
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Carlos Lopes, special envoy of the Brazilian COP30 presidency to Africa, said Africa had shown commitment by coming up with initiatives and also strengthening its continental institutions, “but true progress requires developed countries to lead with predictable, accessible, and just climate finance”.
African leaders asked for international support to implement Africa’s key energy access and transition initiatives including Mission 300 to provide 300 million people with electricity by 2030, clean cooking programmes and efforts to scale up renewables to meet a goal of 300 gigawatts of capacity by 2030.
“Climate finance is the critical enabler: without it, our people cannot thrive and our economies cannot grow,” said Dion George, South Africa’s minister of forestry, fisheries and the environment and head of the country delegation at the Addis summit. “With it, Africa can drive a just transition, create jobs, and play a central role in the global effort to address the climate crisis.”
The post Addis summit trumpets African climate solutions, while quietly backing gas appeared first on Climate Home News.
Addis summit trumpets African climate solutions, while quietly backing gas
Discussing climate change can make a difference. Focusing on the impacts in everyday life is a good place to start, experts say.
When Bad Bunny climbed onto broken power lines during his Super Bowl halftime show, millions of viewers saw a spectacle. Climate communicators saw a lesson in how to talk about climate change.
Wondering How to Talk About Climate Change? Take a Lesson from Bad Bunny
Sydney, Thursday 19 March 2026 — In response to escalating attacks on gas fields in the Middle East, including Israeli strikes on Iran’s giant South Pars gas field and Iranian retaliations on gas fields in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the following lines can be attributed to Solaye Snider, Campaigner at Greenpeace Australia Pacific:
“The targeting of gas fields across the Middle East is a perilous escalation that reinforces just how vulnerable our fossil-fuelled world really is.
“Oil and gas have long been used as tools of power and coercion by authoritarian regimes. They cause climate chaos and environmental pollution and they drive conflict and war. The energy security of every nation still hooked on gas, including Australia, is under direct threat.
“For countries that are reliant on gas imports, like Sri Lanka, Pakistan and South Korea, this crisis is just getting started. It can take months to restart a gas export facility once it is shut down, meaning the shockwaves of these strikes will be felt for a long time to come.
“It is a gross and tragic injustice that while civilians are killed and lose their homes to this escalating violence, and families struggle with a tightening cost-of-living, gas giants like Woodside and Santos have seen their share prices surge on the prospect of windfall war profits.
“We must break this cycle. Transitioning to local renewable energy is the way to protect Australian households from the inherent volatility of fossil fuels like gas.”
-ENDS-
Images available for download via the Greenpeace Media Library
Media contact: Lucy Keller on 0491 135 308 or lkeller@greenpeace.org
Greenpeace response to escalating attacks on gas fields in Middle East
Climate Change
DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case
Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.
This week
Iran war fallout continues
WORK FROM HOME: The International Energy Agency has advised its member countries to take 10 steps in response to the ongoing energy crisis fuelled by the Iran war, including reducing highway speeds and encouraging people to work from home, said the Guardian. It came after retaliatory attacks between Israel and Iran continued to destroy energy infrastructure in the Middle East, causing energy prices to soar further, said Reuters.
SUPPLY DISRUPTED: The IEA also said it is prepared to make more of its member nations’ 1.4bn-barrel oil reserves available to help ease the impacts of what it called the “biggest supply disruption in the history of the oil market”, reported Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Asian countries have been hit hardest by the shortages, caused by a “near-halt” of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
EU SUMMIT: The energy crisis dominated talks at an EU leaders summit on Thursday, said Politico. Arriving at the summit, Spain’s prime minister Pedro Sánchez attacked other European leaders for using the energy crisis as an excuse to “gut climate policies”, according to the EU Observer. The Financial Times said that some European leaders have asked the European Commission to overhaul its flagship emissions trading system (ETS) by summer in response to the energy crisis.
COAL BOOST: In response to the conflict, utility companies in Asia are “boosting coal-fired power generation to cut costs and safeguard energy supply”, said Reuters. UN climate change executive secretary Simon Stiell told Reuters: “If there was ever a moment to accelerate that energy transition, breaking dependencies which have shackled economies, this is the time.”
Around the world
- WINDFARM WINDFALL: The Trump administration in the US is considering a nearly $1bn settlement with TotalEnergies to cancel the French energy company’s two planned windfarms off the US east coast and have it instead invest in fossil-gas infrastructure in Texas, according to documents seen by the New York Times.
- BUSINESS CLASH: Following “clashes” with the agribusiness sector, Brazil launched its new climate plan, which calls for a 49-58% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from 2022 levels by 2025 and includes “specific guidelines for different sectors”, reported Folha de Sao Paolo.
- SALES SLUMP: Sales of liquified petroleum gas from India’s state-run oil companies have fallen by 17% this month due to cuts in deliveries to commercial and industrial consumers “amid the widespread logistical bottlenecks triggered by the Iran war”, said the Economic Times.
- CUBAN ENERGY CRISIS: The US imposed an “effective oil blockade” on Cuba, leaving the country facing its “worst energy crisis in decades”, reported the Washington Post. Meanwhile, Chinese exports of solar panels to the island have “skyrocketed” since 2023, it added.
- RECORD HIGHS: An “unprecedented” heatwave in the western and south-western US is “shattering dozens of temperature records” and could lead to drought in California in the coming months, reported the Los Angeles Times.
- VULNERABILITY CONCERNS: Landslides that killed more than 100 people in southern Ethiopia have “renewed concerns about Ethiopia’s vulnerability to climate-related disasters”, said the Addis Standard.
1%
The percentage of England’s land surface that could be devoted to renewables by 2050, according to the long-awaited “land-use framework” released by the UK government this week and covered by Carbon Brief.
Latest climate research
- Approaching international climate action by shifting the burden of mitigation onto higher-income countries could avoid 13.5 million premature deaths from air pollution in middle- and lower-income countries by 2050 | The Lancet Global Health
- Beavers can turn the ecosystems surrounding streams into “persistent” sinks of carbon that can sequester an order of magnitude more than non-beaver-modified ecosystems can store | Communications Earth & Environment
- Mobile-phone data from seven diverse countries during the summer heatwaves of 2022-23 showed a “widespread tendency to withdraw into homes” and an increase in out-of-home activities that can offer cooling, such as indoor retail | Environmental Research: Climate
(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)
Captured
Carbon Brief this week published a significant update to its map of how climate change is affecting extreme weather events around the world. The map now includes 232 new extreme weather events from studies published in 2024 and 2025. Of these events, 196 were made more severe or more likely to occur by human-driven climate change, 12 were made less severe or less likely to occur and 10 had no discernible human influence. (The remaining 14 studies were inconclusive.)
Spotlight
New Zealand breaks new ground on climate litigation
This week, Carbon Brief speaks to experts about a first-of-its-kind climate lawsuit in New Zealand.
Earlier this week, representatives from two environmentally focused legal advocacy groups challenged the New Zealand government’s climate-action plan in court.
The plaintiffs argued that the measures laid out in the plan are insufficient to achieve the country’s legal obligation to hold global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures.
The case could be “influential” in shaping lawsuits and rulings around the world, one legal expert not involved in the case told Carbon Brief.
Reductions vs removals
The new case contends that there are several issues regarding the New Zealand government’s response to climate change.
One of the key arguments the plaintiffs make is that New Zealand’s second emissions reduction plan, which covers the period from 2026-30, is overreliant on the use of tree-planting to achieve its targets.
When the plan was released in December 2024, it was “immediately clear that it was a pretty lacklustre plan”, Eliza Prestidge Oldfield, senior legal researcher at the Environmental Law Initiative, one of the groups behind the legal case, told Carbon Brief.
The plan called for large-scale planting of pine tree plantations, which are not native to New Zealand and have a high risk of burning. Because of this, there are concerns about how permanent any carbon removal provided by these plantations actually can be, experts told Carbon Brief.
Catherine Higham, senior policy fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment who was not involved in the case, said:
“The lawyers are arguing that there are real challenges with equating the emissions that you may be able to remove from the atmosphere through afforestation with actual emissions reductions, which are much more certain.”
‘Global dialogue’
While other climate lawsuits elsewhere in the world have also focused on the inadequacy of a government’s plan to meet its stated emissions-reduction targets, this is the first such case that addresses the role of removals head-on.
Lucy Maxwell, co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, told Carbon Brief that the lawsuit “builds on a decade of climate litigation” in national, regional and international courts.
Maxwell, who was not involved in the New Zealand case, added that there is a “real global dialogue” between, not just plaintiffs, but national courts as well. She said:
“[National courts] look to common issues that have been decided in other countries. They’re not binding on that court if it’s at the national level, but they are influential.”
Given that many other countries have legal frameworks requiring their governments to create plans outlining the pathway to their long-term climate targets, Prestidge Oldfield told Carbon Brief that other jurisdictions “should be interested in these questions around the level of certainty”.
Higham noted that, even if the case is successful, addressing the plan’s shortfalls will face its own set of challenges. She told Carbon Brief:
“A lot of these decisions are political and they can be politically contentious…Those [measures] have to be put into action through legislation and that is then subject to the usual political process. So that’s where the challenge comes in.”
While she could not speculate on the outcome of the case, Prestidge Oldfield said it was “very heartening” to see that both the judge and the opposing counsel “appreciated how much of a concern climate change is globally”.
She added:
“It’s not a given that the judge would even be interested in climate change.”
Watch, read, listen
COMMON APPROACH: The Heated podcast analysed fossil-fuel advertisements and highlighted the most common deception tactics they employed.
THREAT ASSESSMENT: Mongabay mapped the potential threat that oil extraction poses to Venezuela’s ecosystems, including the Amazon rainforest and its coral reefs.
SALT LAKES? GREAT!: High Country News interviewed journalist Dr Caroline Tracey about her new book on saline lakes – such as Utah’s Great Salt Lake – the threats that face them and what they can teach us.
Coming up
- 23 March-2 April: Third meeting of the preparatory commission for the High Seas Treaty, New York
- 24-27 March: 64th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Bangkok
- 26-29 March: 14th ministerial conference of the World Trade Organization, Yaoundé, Cameroon
Pick of the jobs
- International Centre of Research for the Environment and Development (CIRAD), IPCC chapter scientist | Salary: €3,200-3,750 per month. Location: Nogent-sur-Marne, France
- Avaaz, chief of staff | Salary: Dependent on location. Location: Remote, with preferred time zones
- Green Party, social media officer | Salary: £31,592-£32,192. Location: Remote or Westminster, UK
DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to debriefed@carbonbrief.org.
This is an online version of Carbon Brief’s weekly DeBriefed email newsletter. Subscribe for free here.
The post DeBriefed 20 March 2026: Energy crisis deepens | Brazil’s new climate plan | New Zealand climate case appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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