How to share the bill for climate change fairly will once again top the priority list for African government negotiators at COP30 in Belém, a year after the so-called “Finance COP” in Baku left them feeling short-changed.

As floods, droughts and related food insecurity threaten years of development gains across the continent, African countries say richer nations must step up with finance solutions that help them become more resilient to climate disasters – and transition to cleaner energy – without adding to their hefty debt loads.

Several African countries have lowered ambition for cutting emissions in their latest national climate plans (known as NDCs), citing a lack of funding that has hampered climate action.

For Africa’s climate negotiators, the challenge is not just about money, but making sure the reality of how they are experiencing global warming is recognised with practical solutions as the world strives for net zero emissions by mid-century.

Carlos Lopes, an economist from Guinea-Bissau, who is COP30’s special envoy for Africa, told Climate Home News he expects African countries to “go to the formal negotiations and denounce issues of climate injustice and claim what we believe is the compensation that is required to repair it”.

The goal, he said in an interview, is to change the narrative “to make sure that Africans are not going to be treated as if they were just the vulnerable crowd, the people that are suffering, the ones that need to be helped”.

With COP30 – billed by the Brazilian host government as the “implementation COP” – kicking off on Monday, here are some of the key themes African negotiators are focused on:

Debt-free finance

In Baku, developing countries failed to secure a promise of $1.3 trillion in annual financial support from rich donor governments, as they had proposed. Instead a new goal of $300 billion a year by 2035 was agreed, a sum poorer nations say falls far short of meeting their rising needs.

“We had fairly uncomfortable results in Baku,” Richard Muyungi, the Tanzanian chair of the African Group of Negotiators (AGN), told journalists in the run-up to this year’s COP30 summit.

African governments are hoping the “Baku to Belém Roadmap” – released ahead of COP30 but not formally part of the talks – will be put into practice, boosting the provision of climate cash from both public and private sources to $1.3 trillion a year by 2035.

To avoid heaping more debt on the continent, the bulk of the money should be grant-based resources, as opposed to loans, Muyungi said.

“[Developed countries must] be mindful of the fact that Africa is not ready to take additional burden in terms of financing,” he said, recalling the UN climate convention principle that countries that caused the climate crisis have a greater responsibility to meet the finance gap.

Africa’s debt has more than doubled in the past decade, with high interest repayments, long-term borrowing time-frames, global inflation, disasters and perceived risks fuelling the rising burden. The African Development Bank estimates that Africa’s total external debt had risen to $1.15 trillion by the end of 2023, with debt servicing reaching $163 billion in 2024, up sharply from $61 billion in 2010.

Unlocking adaptation cash to boost resilience

Adaptation is set to be a major theme of COP30 and African negotiators are aiming to unlock cash to implement their national adaptation plans (NAPs) and adopt metrics for adaptation progress that are tailored to Africa’s specific circumstances.

Business-as-usual: Donors pour climate adaptation finance into big infrastructure, neglecting local needs

These metrics were narrowed down at June’s mid-year climate talks in Bonn and in the months since. This is seen as a crucial step for Africa and other developing countries because it will allow them to show how adaptation projects are being implemented on the ground – potentially drawing in more money to build the resilience of local people, economies and infrastructure.

Discussions on finalising a set of around 100 indicators are due to take place in Belém.

COP30 needs to adopt indicators that “reflect Africa’s and vulnerable countries’ realities”, demonstrate progress towards more predictable finance and put adaptation on a par with emissions reduction efforts, said Mohamed Adow, founder of the Nairobi-based think-tank Power Shift Africa.

African negotiators also want to see national adaptation plans becoming a reality on the ground.

So far, more than 20 African countries have submitted their NAPs, detailing measures to cope with climate stresses and disasters. South Africa, for instance, plans to roll out a National Disaster Management Framework, to build the capacity of its emergency response departments, such as health and fire.

But these adaptation strategies are still largely on paper, said AGN head Muyungi. “We have been given resources for the preparation of these plans, but the true implementation of what we need is not given attention,” he lamented.

Benefits for Congo Basin from the TFFF forest fund?

The Congo Basin is home to the world’s second-largest rainforest, yet the region received only 4% of international forest-related financing between 2017 and 2021, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

That means African delegates in Belém are eager to hear more about the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF), an investment-driven forest protection initiative launched last week by COP30 host Brazil.

Felix Tshisekedi, president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, told the pre-COP leaders’ summit that his country is keen to collaborate with other partners to ensure the TFFF is a success.

Explainer: what is the TFFF, Brazil’s COP30 rainforest fund?

Muyungi said questions remain about how the fund will work, however.

“How Africa will benefit from this is still debatable – but we have requested that we get engaged to ensure that we understand how this fund can help the continent,” he said.

In a position paper released ahead of the climate summit, African civil society groups said COP30 must recognise the Congo Basin “as a vital global climate asset and ensure equitable finance flows to its protection and sustainable management”.

Africa-led initiatives such as the Great Green Wall and the 100 million-hectare African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100) must also be supported to strengthen nature-based solutions, they added.

On Friday, Reuters reported that several European donor nations had signed up to a $2.5 billion plan to save the Congo rainforest, launching a conservation scheme that could be seen as a rival to the TFFF.

A just transition made for Africa

After negotiations on a Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) stalled at COP29, activists want to see the issue back in focus at COP30 via a proposed Belém Action Mechanism – a framework to ensure climate action fosters social justice and equity in job creation and finance so that communities and workers reliant on coal mines or oil refineries are not left behind in the global shift to cleaner sources of energy.

Again, securing measures that reflect African concerns will be key, said Muyungi.

“The agenda here is to ensure that just transition is not about e-mobility, it’s not about the hydrogen economy, it’s about ensuring that Africa gets what it needs to be part of the world. Energy accessibility is one of the key priority issues in the just transition,” he said, noting that 600 million Africans still have no access to a reliable power supply.

In his statement at last week’s leaders’ summit in Belém, Ghana’s environment minister, Emmanuel Armah-Kofi Buah, said the shift to clean energy “must not leave vulnerable communities behind”, adding that workers in traditional industries need to be protected, with their voices guiding “our decisions as a bridge and not a cliff”.

And as the world transitions to clean energy, fuelling demand for minerals critical to supply chains, resource-rich African countries are pushing to ensure they reap direct benefits.

COP30 could confront “glaring gap” in clean energy agenda: mining

Civil society groups, in an open letter, urged delegates in Belém to put human rights, environmental protection and equity in mineral value chains at the forefront of COP30 discussions.

“We need to ensure that these critical minerals are indeed helping the continent to move from where we are to go to a better world,” Muyungi said.

Africa’s COP30 envoy Lopes said African countries want to ensure that discussions at COP30 on critical minerals focus on how those resources “should be used to power Africa’s transition” rather than those of other countries, and how the shift to clean energy can support their development more broadly.

Loss and damage payouts for climate impacts

Between 2020 and 2030, loss and damage costs in Africa are estimated to range between $280 billion-$440 billion a year, depending on the level of warming and severity of extreme weather events including storms, droughts, flooding and rising seas, according to the African Development Bank.

In its new climate plan, South Africa says climate impacts in the country have exceeded the limits of adaptation and it is now facing “irreplaceable loss” as climate change damages cultural heritage sites, erodes indigenous knowledge systems, shrinks farmlands, reduces economic growth and worsens health through problems like heat-driven illness. The plan calls for international support to help it cope.

At COP30, where the new global Fund for Responding to Loss and Damage (FRLD) was due to put out its first call for proposals on Monday, African civil society groups want to see the fund provide grants to help climate-vulnerable nations on the continent with both sudden and slow-onset crises such as losses caused by rising seas or desertification.

Loss and damage fund will launch call for proposals at COP30

In the case of climate disasters, mechanisms for rapid emergency response and disbursement of money should also be established, they said. Those could include direct cash transfers to affected populations and budget support for national and local governments.

Africa COP30 envoy Lopes, who has previously held positions at the United Nations and African Union, said loss and damage must be addressed on “a tragedy-emergency basis”, adding that Africa needs a fund that is “efficient” and can “change the reality of an emergency as fast as possible”.

After the FRLD was launched to great fanfare two years ago at the COP28 talks in Dubai, there were hopes for quick results, he noted, but so far little has materialised and the fund – which currently has only around $400 million in its coffers – has received no significant new donations.

“It’s one more instance where climate justice is being shortchanged with words that continue to over-promise and under-deliver,” Lopes said.

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What do African countries want from COP30?