Baku, Azerbaijan—Africa faces a unique double challenge as the world grapples with the escalating climate crisis. The continent is disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, from extreme weather events to rising sea levels. At the same time, the African people and their initiatives remain underfunded, which negatively impacts their efforts to adapt and mitigate these effects.
Jean Pierre Elong Mbassi, Secretary General of the Union of the Cities and Local Governments of Africa (UCGLA), underscored this in the morning while underscoring the urgent need for adaptation.
Speaking during a panel on emerging digital technologies, he said, “Adaptation is key in climate change resilience,”
Mbassi also said, “Africa pays double what is going into African care, “ emphasizing that, “Africa needs to use technology to try and catch up with adaptation.”
This notwithstanding the proposed technology for adaptation for Africa is largely foreign. The continent’s innovations can be summed up at less than 10 percent of the globally known ideas.
Notably, Mbassi also underscored the importance of transparency in climate finance. In his view “It is important to have a more transparent system,”
However, transparency is a bit farfetched, Chris Poullaira, the Chief Technology Officer of Blockchains and Climate Institute, outrightly said while explaining the complexities of global governance.
In a rather unorthodox stance, he said,” AI is not necessarily the panacea of climate change,”
“If we do not have a robust system that is timely and credible, it will be difficult to address the climate crisis.”
Poullaira believes that the challenges of building prototype technologies for climate change have caused an unspoken mistrust among stakeholders.
But he is not alone, a group of activists at COP29 also lauded his views stating that climate finance is a hoax and decision-makers have decided to make Africans more poorer by deliberately making them pay up for the challenges they already endure.
Whether COP 29 will yield any tangible outcomes to aid Africa’s burden will be told over time.