President Cyril Ramaphosa called on developed countries to honour the commitments made to African countries in supporting the continent’s right to development, international equity and transitions that are just and inclusive.
Speaking at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh Egypt on Tuesday, Ramaphosa said Africa would need a predictable, appropriate and at-scale funding stream and technological support.
He said that to do this, multilateral development banks needed to be reformed to meet the needs of developing economies for sustainable development and climate resilience.
“At present, multilateral support is out of reach of the majority of the world’s population due to lending policies that are risk averse and carry onerous costs and conditionalities,” Ramaphosa said. “We need a clear road map to deliver on the Glasgow decision to double adaptation financing by 2025.”
The COP27 gathering is happening as Africa experiences the worsening effects of climate change. The continent needs a dramatic increase in global mitigation ambition to keep the world on the “1.5°C pathway”, and to do this, Africa needs to build adaptive capacity, foster resilience and address loss and damage, as agreed at Paris COP21, Ramaphosa said.
“To achieve this, our continent will need a predictable, appropriate and at-scale funding stream and technological support. This must support our right to development, international equity and transitions that are just and inclusive,” he said.
SA unveiled its just energy transition (JET) investment plan on Friday ahead of the COP27 climate summit.
The plan, which is the first of its kind globally, was sparked by the $8.5bn (R128bn) that the UK, US, France, Germany and the EU offered to support SA’s just energy transition, at COP26 in Glasgow a year ago.
It was approved by the cabinet last week and endorsed by the international partner group, and is expected to be launched formally by the leaders of the group and Ramaphosa in Egypt this week.
The JET investment plan outlines the total investment needed over the next five years — in electricity, green hydrogen and new-energy vehicles — to enable SA to achieve its ambitious climate targets in a just way.
Ramaphosa told delegates that at a national level, SA was fully committed to achieving the most ambitious end of the mitigation range in its updated Nationally Determined Contribution.
“As a country, we are guided by a just-transition framework and an investment plan that outlines the enormous scale and nature of investments needed to achieve our decarbonisation goals over the next five years,” Ramaphosa said. “We are already scaling up investment in renewable energy, and are on course to retire several of our ageing coal-fired power plants by the end of 2030.”
At COP26 in Glasgow in 2021, France, Germany, the UK, US and EU offered support in the form of a Just Energy Transition Partnership.
“It is our hope that this partnership will offer a groundbreaking approach to funding by developed countries for the ambitious but necessary mitigation and adaptation goals of developing countries,” Ramaphosa said.
The commitments that are needed for SA to embark on this difficult journey are close to $98bn, about R1.5-trillion, and we have said that the categorisation of the funding needs to be well packaged so that there are meaningful grants, meaningful concessional loans and investments by a variety of institutions,” he said.
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