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United States climate envoy John Kerry has held out the prospect of additional help being offered at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) to counties in Africa and elsewhere that are being badly affected by climate change issues.

Speeches made by African leaders at the 1-2 November opening of COP26 provided some insights into how they plan to move ahead with decarbonisation, while ensuring they don’t lose out on development opportunities for their economies. African Energy examines an A-to-Z of the leaders’ preoccupations

COP26 opened with high-minded speeches and a welter of public and private sector commitments, as dozens of African nations said they would accelerate their own decarbonisation. Governments called for existing pledges to tackle environmental disaster to be met, underpinning a ‘just transition’ in which poorer economies aren’t penalised by big emitters’ plans to cut carbon.

Egypt’s COP27 is likely to be a fractious affair after the illusory harmony of COP26 in Glasgow, reflecting the daunting scale of financial support African nations need to protect themselves from climate change impacts while achieving developmental goals and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. With developed nations’ budgets and stock of political capital for dealing with the climate crisis already depleted, African Energy’s monitoring of preparations for Sharm El Sheikh suggests it is becoming painfully clear that African negotiators’ demands cannot or will not be met at COP27.

President Abdel Fattah El Sisi’s aim of using COP27 to bolster Egypt’s credentials as a regional green energy hub have seen deals on multi-gigawatt wind farms and the commissioning of the first green hydrogen (GH2) pilot project in Africa. But tricky compromises will be needed to turn some of the heady plans into reality.

More information has emerged about the mix of finance that will support South Africa’s Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP). An official source from a G7 country told African Energy “there is an amount of grant and technical assistance. It is significant but not enormous.”

Senegal is in line to receive $1bn in climate finance via the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Program (AAAP), a joint initiative of the African Development Bank (AfDB) and Netherlands-based climate foundation the Global Center on Adaptation (GCA).

The World Bank has agreed to extend $1bn to South Africa to help the government’s energy security goals and the transition to a low carbon economy. The development policy loan is expected to help with restructuring of the power sector through the unbundling of state-owned power utility Eskom, as well as encouraging private investment in renewable energy.

The African Development Bank (AfDB) and its partners are planning to create what they call the world’s largest mini-grid market in Nigeria, using the new Leveraging Energy Access Finance (Leaf) financing model to support the Rural Electrification Agency (REA)’s Nigeria Electrification Programme (NEP).

One of the most ambitious claims to emerge from COP26 was that substantial public financing commitments from wealthy nations would unlock a much larger amount of international and domestic private finance. But numbers reviewed by African Energy reveal that there is a staggeringly large finance gap to bridge in Africa.

The Opec Fund for International Development (Ofid) is expanding its Energy Compact partnership with Sustainable Energy for All (SEforALL) to accelerate access to clean cooking, with a focus on sub-Saharan Africa. 

Arguments are intensifying over climate justice, the very meaning of climate finance, the role of gas as a transition fuel and – most of all – money. The combination of which means a ‘just energy transition’ that enables African nations to meet economic development targets seems a long way off.

The government plans to unveil an implementation plan for the $8.5bn Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) at the COP28 climate summit, which is due to take place in Dubai in November/December.

Many African countries see themselves as green sinks, with substantial forest cover which absorbs carbon from the atmosphere, but for which they receive no compensation. The issue – along with a pact to reduce methane emissions – featured prominently on 2 November, when the leaders of more than 100 countries committed to end deforestation by 2030;

The draft Kenya Energy White Paper, published in July, set out an overarching approach to the country’s energy sector. The white paper was not designed as a formal policy document but rather one that proposed “the type of policies that will be needed to achieve the country’s energy objectives”.