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.
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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.
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.
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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.
The post What do African countries want from COP30? appeared first on Climate Home News.
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Drought and heatwaves occurring together – known as “compound” events – have “surged” across the world since the early 2000s, a new study shows.
Compound drought and heat events (CDHEs) can have devastating effects, creating the ideal conditions for intense wildfires, such as Australia’s “Black Summer” of 2019-20 where bushfires burned 24m hectares and killed 33 people.
The research, published in Science Advances, finds that the increase in CDHEs is predominantly being driven by events that start with a heatwave.
The global area affected by such “heatwave-led” compound events has more than doubled between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, the study says.
The rapid increase in these events over the last 23 years cannot be explained solely by global warming, the authors note.
Since the late 1990s, feedbacks between the land and the atmosphere have become stronger, making heatwaves more likely to trigger drought conditions, they explain.
One of the study authors tells Carbon Brief that societies must pay greater attention to compound events, which can “cause severe impacts on ecosystems, agriculture and society”.
Compound events
CDHEs are extreme weather events where drought and heatwave conditions occur simultaneously – or shortly after each other – in the same region.
These events are often triggered by large-scale weather patterns, such as “blocking” highs, which can produce “prolonged” hot and dry conditions, according to the study.
Prof Sang-Wook Yeh is one of the study authors and a professor at the Ewha Womans University in South Korea. He tells Carbon Brief:
“When heatwaves and droughts occur together, the two hazards reinforce each other through land-atmosphere interactions. This amplifies surface heating and soil moisture deficits, making compound events more intense and damaging than single hazards.”
CDHEs can begin with either a heatwave or a drought.
The sequence of these extremes is important, the study says, as they have different drivers and impacts.
For example, in a CDHE where the heatwave was the precursor, increased direct sunshine causes more moisture loss from soils and plants, leading to a drought.
Conversely, in an event where the drought was the precursor, the lack of soil moisture means that less of the sun’s energy goes into evaporation and more goes into warming the Earth’s surface. This produces favourable conditions for heatwaves.
The study shows that the majority of CDHEs globally start out as a drought.
In recent years, there has been increasing focus on these events due to the devastating impact they have on agriculture, ecosystems and public health.
In Russia in the summer of 2010, a compound drought-heatwave event – and the associated wildfires – caused the death of nearly 55,000 people, the study notes.
The record-breaking Pacific north-west “heat dome” in 2021 triggered extreme drought conditions that caused “significant declines” in wheat yields, as well as in barley, canola and fruit production in British Columbia and Alberta, Canada, says the study.
Increasing events
To assess how CDHEs are changing, the researchers use daily reanalysis data to identify droughts and heatwaves events. (Reanalysis data combines past observations with climate models to create a historical climate record.) Then, using an algorithm, they analyse how these events overlap in both time and space.
The study covers the period from 1980 to 2023 and the world’s land surface, excluding polar regions where CDHEs are rare.
The research finds that the area of land affected by CDHEs has “increased substantially” since the early 2000s.
Heatwave-led events have been the main contributor to this increase, the study says, with their spatial extent rising 110% between 1980-2001 and 2002-23, compared to a 59% increase for drought-led events.
The map below shows the global distribution of CDHEs over 1980-2023. The charts show the percentage of the land surface affected by a heatwave-led CDHE (red) or a drought-led CDHE (yellow) in a given year (left) and relative increase in each CDHE type (right).
The study finds that CDHEs have occurred most frequently in northern South America, the southern US, eastern Europe, central Africa and south Asia.
Threshold passed
The authors explain that the increase in heatwave-led CDHEs is related to rising global temperatures, but that this does not tell the whole story.
In the earlier 22-year period of 1980-2001, the study finds that the spatial extent of heatwave-led CDHEs rises by 1.6% per 1C of global temperature rise. For the more-recent period of 2022-23, this increases “nearly eightfold” to 13.1%.
The change suggests that the rapid increase in the heatwave-led CDHEs occurred after the global average temperature “surpasse[d] a certain temperature threshold”, the paper says.
This threshold is an absolute global average temperature of 14.3C, the authors estimate (based on an 11-year average), which the world passed around the year 2000.
Investigating the recent surge in heatwave-leading CDHEs further, the researchers find a “regime shift” in land-atmosphere dynamics “toward a persistently intensified state after the late 1990s”.
In other words, the way that drier soils drive higher surface temperatures, and vice versa, is becoming stronger, resulting in more heatwave-led compound events.
Daily data
The research has some advantages over other previous studies, Yeh says. For instance, the new work uses daily estimations of CDHEs, compared to monthly data used in past research. This is “important for capturing the detailed occurrence” of these events, says Yeh.
He adds that another advantage of their study is that it distinguishes the sequence of droughts and heatwaves, which allows them to “better understand the differences” in the characteristics of CDHEs.
Dr Meryem Tanarhte is a climate scientist at the University Hassan II in Morocco, and Dr Ruth Cerezo Mota is a climatologist and a researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Both scientists, who were not involved in the study, agree that the daily estimations give a clearer picture of how CDHEs are changing.
Cerezo-Mota adds that another major contribution of the study is its global focus. She tells Carbon Brief that in some regions, such as Mexico and Africa, there is a lack of studies on CDHEs:
“Not because the events do not occur, but perhaps because [these regions] do not have all the data or the expertise to do so.”
However, she notes that the reanalysis data used by the study does have limitations with how it represents rainfall in some parts of the world.
Compound impacts
The study notes that if CDHEs continue to intensify – particularly events where heatwaves are the precursors – they could drive declining crop productivity, increased wildfire frequency and severe public health crises.
These impacts could be “much more rapid and severe as global warming continues”, Yeh tells Carbon Brief.
Tanarhte notes that these events can be forecasted up to 10 days ahead in many regions. Furthermore, she says, the strongest impacts can be prevented “through preparedness and adaptation”, including through “water management for agriculture, heatwave mitigation measures and wildfire mitigation”.
The study recommends reassessing current risk management strategies for these compound events. It also suggests incorporating the sequences of drought and heatwaves into compound event analysis frameworks “to enhance climate risk management”.
Cerezo-Mota says that it is clear that the world needs to be prepared for the increased occurrence of these events. She tells Carbon Brief:
“These [risk assessments and strategies] need to be carried out at the local level to understand the complexities of each region.”
The post Heatwaves driving recent ‘surge’ in compound drought and heat extremes appeared first on Carbon Brief.
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