The Zambian government’s cuts to fossil fuel subsidies may be helping reduce the use of planet-heating oil – but they are causing hardship among groups that rely disproportionately on fossil fuels to make a living, including taxi drivers.
The green policy aims to boost both climate action and the heavily-indebted Zambian economy, but taxi drivers in Lusaka, the southern African country’s capital, told Climate Home they are suffering from rising prices for driving and food.
“We have been hit hard,” said 29-year old Masuzyo Kampamba, as he motored down a two-lane highway towards past crowds of children celebrating national youth day last month.
Kampamba doesn’t feel able to get married and start a family as he would not be able to provide for them due to the high cost of living.
Waiting outside the upmarket East Park Mall, driver Stephen Musanda said he is struggling too.
Filling up his regular Toyota taxi used to cost 17 kwacha ($0.70) a litre – for which he now pays 31 kwacha ($1.30). “It’s hard for a common driver like me to survive,” he said.
A Total petrol station near Lusaka’s Central Business District on March 10, 2024 (Photo: Joe Lo)
IMF’s global push
In debt-strapped developing countries like Zambia, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) is using its financial power to push for the removal of fossil fuel subsidies. Similar IMF-backed policies in Haiti and Ecuador have led to mass protests in the last few years.
At the Cop28 UN climate summit last December, governments agreed to contribute to a global effort to transition away from fossil fuels “in a just, orderly and equitable manner”. What that means in practice is still being worked out.
In Zambia and other places like Nigeria, many ordinary citizens feel the shift away from fossil fuel subsidies has not been done fairly so far, with the burden falling on those who cannot afford it. Even supporters of the reforms in Zambia admit they are “painful”.
On a global level, the IMF argues that subsidies incentivise the use of fossil fuels like oil and gas, making climate change worse, while also being expensive, wasteful and skewed towards helping the rich more than the poor.
My message at today’s @wef session on climate and nature: pull back on harmful fossil fuel subsidies and use those resources for climate action. With action, we can leave a heathy planet to our children and grandchildren. #wef24 pic.twitter.com/Uh7TcyafHI
— Kristalina Georgieva (@KGeorgieva) January 17, 2024
In a bid to boost sustainable development, the Washington-based lender has encouraged governments to spend the savings from reducing their support for fossil fuels on climate action, healthcare or education. Zambia has used the money it has freed up for paying down the national debt and making public schools free.
Richard Bridle, a subsidies expert at the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD), generally supports such reforms, but said proper analysis must be carried out to identify those most affected and compensate them.
“Generally, the poor don’t have cars,” he said, but there are “particularly affected groups” whose business costs are exposed to fuel prices – like taxi drivers – and they require special attention.
“You’ve got to have steps being taken to understand the impact, particularly on the most vulnerable groups, and – where possible – mitigate that impact,” Bridle said.
Education not petrol
When Zambian President Hakainde Hichilema was elected in August 2021, he inherited $800 million a year of spending on fossil fuel subsidies – 4% of gross domestic product (GDP) – and debt of almost $1 billion which the government was failing even to pay interest on.
He turned to the IMF for another loan – and in December 2021, Zambia was granted a $1.4-billion extended credit facility.
Announcing this credit, the IMF’s then mission chief for Zambia, Allison Holland, said the conditions were that Zambia should cut what the IMF sees as “inefficient” subsidies, reduce its debt level, and increase spending on education and health.
ZAMBIA’S #IMF PROGRAMME: Message from the IMF Mission Chief for Zambia, Ms. ALLISON HOLLAND.@S_Musokotwane @KGeorgieva @IMFAfrica pic.twitter.com/j17kCKck8t
— Ministry of Finance & National Planning – Zambia (@mofnpzambia) September 4, 2022
The IMF sees subsidies as “inefficient” if they hinder economic growth, exacerbate air pollution and climate change, and benefit those with high incomes. Holland said fuel subsidies were an example of spending that is “wasteful” and “doesn’t help the poor”.
In response, the government completely removed direct fossil fuel subsidies for 2022 and, in October that year, it restored taxes on petrol and diesel which the previous government had cut.
Hichilema also announced that public school education would be made free from January 2022. “When we removed fuel subsidies, this is what we intended for our people,” he said in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Ever imagined that you’d be entering January without worrying about school fees? Jan 2022, if you have a child in public school, you won’t pay anything.
This is what we promised & have delivered. When we removed fuel subsidies, this is what we intended for our people. #Zambia pic.twitter.com/b49D9CTigV— Hakainde Hichilema (@HHichilema) December 29, 2021
The government is planning to boost spending on social protection too. In 2020, it spent just 0.7% of GDP on welfare programmes like giving money and food to poor people, but by 2025 it plans to raise this to 1.6%, bringing it in line with the African average.
“Overall, for low-income households, the benefits from increased social spending should outweigh the impact from the removal of fuel and electricity subsidies,” a 2022 IMF analysis said.
Painful but necessary
During a reporting trip this March, Climate Home asked Zambia’s environment minister, a farmer and a rural teacher about the fuel subsidy cuts. All said the measures had been painful, making driving, farming and eating more expensive – but they saw them as necessary.
Green economy and environment minister Collins Nzovu said “there is going to be pain” from removing subsidies, but asked “were we going to keep accumulating debt or we’re going to say this is where we end?”
In the village of Katoba in Lusaka province, secondary school teacher Constancy Mbwenya said spending on subsidies had previously diverted money from health and education.
The subsidy cuts are “a good policy”, he said, but required a period of adjustment. “People need to acclimatise to the new situation,” he explained. “That’s where the hassle is a bit, but then eventually people will understand the importance of removing the subsidies.”
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At the steering wheel, Musanda and Kampamba welcomed free education – although they questioned whether there are enough teachers per pupil, and whether the children can afford to eat at home because of food inflation.
“It’s right because those who were not going to school… are now going to school,” said Musanda. But, he added, “it is difficult for us who used to survive on subsidies”.
IISD’s Bridle compared the situation to France’s “gilets jaunes” (yellow vest) protests, sparked in late 2018 when the French government tried to hike taxes on petrol and diesel and spend the money on climate action.
The rural working class felt the costs of green policies were falling unfairly on them, while they failed to see direct benefits, Bridle said. The large-scale opposition to the policy forced the government into a U-turn and hurt the popularity of French President Emmanuel Macron.
Taxi driver Musanda said similar social unrest was unlikely in Zambia: “We are not used to doing protests.” Instead, many voters might look to bring in a new government at the country’s next elections in 2026, he noted.
According to Bridle, that risk is why governments often rush through reforms well ahead of the next election.
In Zambia, less than one in 20 people own a vehicle, so the vast majority are less affected by the subsidy increase than Musanda.
Corn and peanut farmer Benson Chipungu poses in his field on March 7, 2024 (Photo: Joe Lo)
Benson Chipungu, who spoke to Climate Home on his maize and peanut farm in Chongwe village, 50 km east of Lusaka, said it now costs him more to fill up his tractor with diesel – but he is willing to accept the change nonetheless.
“I think it’s fine because [the government] has made that decision knowing that maybe the subsidies were being a burden on the economy,” he said. “It can be painful – but if… they think it’s going to come out right, then it’s fine – you can try to hang in there.”
The post Zambia’s fossil-fuel subsidy cuts help climate and kids – but taxi drivers suffer appeared first on Climate Home News.
Zambia’s fossil-fuel subsidy cuts help climate and kids – but taxi drivers suffer
Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.
The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.
Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.
The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?
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To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.
Tool for efficient investment
Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.
Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.
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New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.
Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.
What COP31 and COP32 should do
The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.
First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.
Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.
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Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.
This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.
The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.
The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.
El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.
This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.
The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.
El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.
Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.
The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record.
Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River.
They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.
The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.
Record lows
At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.
The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August.
The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres.
While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.
Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.”
Compounding factors
The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah.
This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.
At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992.
Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:
“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”
On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.
Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:
“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
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