Today is Wednesday, September 06, 2023.
At the first-ever African Climate Summit happening in Nairobi, Kenya these days, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Independent Climate Change Accelerators (UICCA) signed a Letter of Intent (LOI) to pledge an indicative intended purchase of US$450 million in African carbon credits by 2030.
The LOI was signed with the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI) and seeks to boost Africa's carbon credit production 19-fold by 2030.
ACMI was launched at Egypt's COP27 last year to promote market-based financing instruments and carbon credits, which can be generated by projects such as planting trees or switching to cleaner fuels and energy sources. It is supported, by The Rockefeller Foundation and the UN Climate Change High-Level Champions, among others.
Given some expected preassure from African states at the coming COP28, particularly related to the International Monetary Fund, Germany already announced a EUR 60 million debt swap with Kenya to free up money for green projects.
But there is also opposition to these approaches of climate finance. About 500 people marched in downtown Nairobi on Monday to protest, as you can read in this article from Africa News. There is also a 2 minutes video showing the demonstrations and angry slogans and speaches like "Less talk, more action for climate ..." or "... what we need now is system change, not climate change ..."
Another quote worth mentioning comes from an article from Reuters. It relates to Sultan Al Jaber, president of COP28, refering to carbon markets: "a lack of commonly-agreed standards was undermining their integrity and diminishing their value".
COP28 promises a lot of debate.
Click at the image below to read the official press release about the LOI at the website of the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative.
Last but not least, in a post titled "War of carbon credits ? Or just another export commodity?" from last May, we talked a lot about African initiatives, including ACMI and the partial nationalization of the local voluntary carbon credit markets by the Zimbabwean government. Worth recall.
