COP26 Climate Summit Not Hearing Africa’s Concerns

While developed nations announce at the COP26 climate summit pledge after pledge to reduce emissions, the concerns of the less developed countries are not being heard during the closed-door talks, a delegate from Ghana said, as quoted by Upstream.  

“The stated commitments by the G20 and developed nations are very different from what’s happening in the negotiating room,” the representative of the Ghanaian ministerial delegation said at an Adaptation panel at the summit.   

According to the delegate, “The least emitters are the worst hit” while the “fiscal environment is damaged by mankind itself”, per Upstream.

Less developed nations need financing and funding to cope with climate change and, at the same time, provide energy to people without access to such.

Developing nations need much more than the current one-fifth of global funding on fighting climate change, delegates at the summit were told.

In April this year, UN Secretary-General António Guterres’ called for a “massive scale-up of climate adaptation in Africa.”

“African countries continue to contribute little to global emissions, so deep is the continent’s energy poverty. Yet Africa is on the front lines of dramatic climate impacts, from floods to cyclones and drought that can wipe out decades of development gains overnight,” Guterres’ said.

South Africa, for example, did not sign the COP26 coal pledge of 40 countries to phase out coal, South African Environment Minister Barbara Creecy told Daily Maverick this week.

“And I think that we would be worried about situations where there’s an increase in tendency to set up platforms and pledges that are outside of the negotiation process. We think that it disadvantages developing countries,” Creecy said.

Last week, Sonam Phuntsho Wangdi, Chair of the Least Developed Countries Group at UN Climate Change negotiations, said that the COP26 climate summit had so far disappointed with a lack of progress.

“The progress made here is disappointing and in a way also frightening,” Wangdi said.

“Raising global ambition and increasing climate finance is paramount to our survival,” the Least Developed Countries Group said in a statement ahead of the climate summit.

The least developed countries in the UN list include 46 countries, including the African countries Sudan, South Sudan, Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gambia, Burundi, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Somalia, Uganda, Tanzania, and Zambia.

By Charles Kennedy for Oilprice.com

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