Virtual Event: Discussing Africa’s leadership in climate overshoot responses

On 15 March 2024 (11:00 am CET), the Climate Overshoot Commission and AGRA co-organized a virtual event with African experts focused on "Discussing Africa’s leadership in climate overshoot responses". This event explored the impacts of warming on Africa, and put forward the recommendations – in particular those related to adaptation and finance – of the Climate Overshoot Commission to put African countries and their countries at the centre of the responses to this global challenge.

Context:

The combination of geographic location and lack of adaptive capacity makes adaptation to climate change especially important for African countries. The Commission put forward several recommendations, such as the development of JET-Ps for adaptation, intended to boost resilience to increasing climate risks. Some of them–a vulnerability index, metrics, early warning systems–are directly relevant to the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA).

The event also focused on the fact that climate action requires climate finance, while the current level of such finance falls significantly short of what is needed. For African countries, climate and development finance needs are closely intertwined, and the gap between promised and delivered climate finance, which has created distrust, must be closed. The discussion will focus on the mobilization of more resources as well as innovative financing pathways, including in the context of reforming the international financial architecture as discussed at the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank last October.

Event objectives:

The objectives of this event on climate overshoot were three-fold:

• To discuss effective pathways to elevate African concerns in the global debate while the risks of climate overshoot are rising and its impacts more devastating;
• To address the political, technological and financial gaps between industrialized and less industrialized countries when facing global warming;
• To use the event as a high-level platform to raise awareness on the risks related to climate overshoot, and introduce the latest debates on climate technologies, their risks and any possible benefits, to African audiences.

With the participation of:

• Agnes Kalibata, President of AGRA, member of the Climate Overshoot Commission
• Dr. Chris Lennard, Environmental Scientist, University of Cape Town
• Yero Sarr, Fridays for future (Senegal)
• Hafsa Maalim, Climate Diplomacy expert and fellow, Enzi Ijayo Africa Initiative
• Moderator: Jeremiah Thoronka, member of Youth Group of the Climate Overshoot Commission (Sierra Leone)