African countries have called for a global carbon tax, debt relief and a raft of reforms of the international financial system to support climate action on the continent and worldwide.
The proposal forms part of the "Nairobi declaration" issued on the last day of the inaugural Africa Climate Summit. The declaration will underpin Africa's common position in negotiations at this year's UN Cop 28 climate conference and beyond.
The summit's outcome marks a significant departure from many African leaders' previous rhetoric, which was that Africa would chart its own "just energy transition" while continuing to exploit its domestic oil and gas resources, without being dictated to by industrialised nations which are primarily to blame for climate change. Instead, it reframes the African continent, with its abundant clean energy minerals and renewable energy resources, as the solution to climate change and not just a victim.
World leaders should "appreciate that decarbonising the global economy is also an opportunity to contribute to equality and shared prosperity", according to the declaration. "We urge world leaders to rally behind the proposal for a [global] carbon taxation regime including a carbon tax on fossil fuel trade, maritime transport and aviation."
This could be supplemented by a global financial transaction tax (FTT) to provide dedicated finance for climate-positive investments, which should be ringfenced from geopolitical and national interests, the declaration suggests.
African leaders also called for "a new financing architecture that is responsive to Africa's needs" and "collective global action to mobilise the necessary capital for both development and climate action". As part of this, they want to see debt restructuring and relief for African nations, a 10-year grace period on interest payments, an extension of the tenor of sovereign loans and debt repayment pauses when climate disasters strike. With these aims in mind, they suggest a new Global Climate Finance Charter should be developed through UN General Assembly and Cop processes by 2025.
They also want to see an increase in concessional finance to emerging economies, as well as wide-ranging reforms of the international financial system to ease the high cost of capital for African nations. "The scale of financing required to unlock Africa's climate-positive growth is beyond the borrowing capacity of national balance sheets, or at the risk premium that Africa is currently paying for private capital," the declaration says.
In addition, leaders called for a range of measures to "elevate Africa's share of carbon markets". They see Africa taking the lead in "the development of global standards, metrics and market mechanisms to accurately value and compensate for the protection of nature, biodiversity, socio-economic co-benefits and the provision of climate services".
Fair and equitable
African leaders also want global and regional trade mechanisms to be designed in such a manner that "African products can compete on fair and equitable terms". In support of this, they want unilateral and discriminatory measures such as environmental trade tariffs to be eliminated. In return, they committed to not only limit their own emissions but also aid global decarbonisation efforts by "leapfrogging traditional industrial development and fostering green production and supply chains on a global scale".
They expressed concern that only 2pc of $3 trillion in renewable energy investments in the last decade have come to Africa, despite the fact that the continent has an estimated 40pc of the world's renewable energy resources. To transform the global economy in line with climate needs, African leaders called on the international community to contribute towards increasing the continent's renewable power generation to at least 300GW by 2030 from 56GW in 2022. Meeting this target at an estimated cost of $600bn will require a tenfold increase in capital flowing into Africa's renewable energy sector over the next seven years, they said.
