Strategic Priorities for Africa in the Post-2025 Climate Finance Framework
Addressing the climate crisis has never been more urgent. The devastating impacts of climate change are increasing in frequency and severity, creating irreversible loss and damage. Across Africa, countries are disproportionately impacted by climate change-induced severe weather, despite their negligible contributions to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. In 2022, floods, drought, and heat waves affected over 110 million people across the continent and resulted in economic damages exceeding US$ 8.5 billion. The need for climate financing to implement adaptation, mitigation, and loss and damage interventions cannot be overemphasized.
In this context, the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) on climate finance, currently under negotiation, has emerged as a promising framework designed to address the financial needs of developing countries in their fight against climate change. It is poised to take over from the US$ 100 billion goal and define a new dimension of climate finance that should meet the needs of developing countries, particularly in Africa. At COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, a fit-for-purpose NCQG should include key recommendations.
- The goal should be ambitious to reflect the true scale and urgency of addressing the climate crisis, with developed countries providing and mobilizing it.
- Quick and easy access to climate finance is crucial. The NCQG must commit to more and simpler disbursement processes and lower transaction costs, while promoting simplified direct access for a broader range of stakeholders, including national governments, private sector players, civil society organizations and local communities to ensure wider and more effective climate action.
- The NCQG must use financial instruments that enhance the availability, responsiveness, and effectiveness of climate finance without placing additional economic or financial burdens on developing countries.
- The finance should be grant-based, predictable, reliable and time-bound, considering the historical responsibilities of developed countries for emissions, and must be designed to avoid maladaptation and climate debt burden.
- The NCQG needs to guarantee and be delivered in accordance with the principle of additionality, by providing new climate finance that is over and above the Official Development Assistance (ODA).
- Funding should be gender-responsive and inclusive, supporting the most vulnerable, while ensuring equal access to funding and participation in decision-making processes.
- The NCQG must have a concrete, yearly target over a 5-year duration, in line with the NDC cycle, whereby the Global Stocktake facilitates progress tracking and review to inform updates of the goal.
- The NCQG must establish thematic subgoals for mitigation, adaptation, and loss & damage, which are determined on the basis of assessed needs and priorities, with targets for the provision of public finance for each.
- The NCQG must be significantly higher than the current goal of US$ 100 billion per year, reflecting African countries’ actual needs to address climate change.
- The NCQG should establish a common definition of climate finance that ensures that only grants and highly concessional, climate-specific finance are counted as climate finance for a just, fair, and equitable fossil fuel transition.
- The NCQG must incorporate fairness, equity, and justice considerations, including the precarious debt distress conditions of African countries.
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