A sad, parched tree with crispy brown leaves stood in front of the Blue Zone of the United Nations Climate Change Conference, COP27, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. It was in a pot and surrounded by plexiglass with the logo of the event; behind them were placed large, colorful vertical banners with photographs and sarcastic words, “Water,” “Solutions,” and “Agriculture and Food Systems. “
World leaders who have accumulated over the past two weeks knew they needed to halve fossil fuel burning by 2030 to combat climate change well, just as the landscaper who placed the once-green tree in front knew there would have to be a drip irrigation hose. to water the tree. However, it didn’t happen either.
“COP27 took position not far from Mount Sinai, a center for many religions and for the story of Moses or Musa. This is appropriate,” UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in his closing remarks. Proportions. Signs are everywhere. Instead of a burning bush, we are facing a burning planet. “
As a participant, there is something deceptively exciting about those annual global climate meetings. As you walk through the well-designed pavilions, pay attention to the inspiring speakers and harness the renewable power of the tens of thousands of others who have come. combined to save the planet, it seems that there would possibly be enough momentum for the kind of political breakthroughs that would be needed to avoid what the Secretary-General has called “hell time”.
And then I kept walking through the dead tree, fueled by the punitive Sinai sun and overlooked by COP27 organizers.
COP27 failed.
Worse, it has failed the world’s most vulnerable people. Yes, there was an ethical victory in creating a “loss and damage” fund through rich nations for deficient nations. But those funds, if they actually materialize, will be used to upgrade the bridges. in Mozambique destroyed by the spread of cyclones, providing clean water remediation to communities in Pakistan and Nigeria devastated by recent floods, compensating farmers in Kenya for harvest problems due to further desertification, rebuilding key infrastructure in countries in the wake of now-overburdened hurricanes and more. But the most cost-effective way to help less evolved and vulnerable nations is to avoid Beat around the bush.
Just as no water has reached this deficient tree in the blue zone, virtually no weather budget has been delivered to the poorest countries since the Paris climate agreements in 2015. In fact, the vital but overlooked maximum report published at COP27 is that of BloombergNEF’s Luiza Demoro. who showed that less than 1% of meteorological funding went to Africa and from this drop in the ocean of meteorological funding, the vast majority went to South Africa, Morocco and Egypt and not to Burundi, South Sudan, Malawi, Uganda, Liberia, Mali, Sudan and other poorer nations. In other words, not only has the foreign grid failed to reduce emissions enough to prevent its costly mistakes from hitting the poorest communities, but it has cultivated the lie that the billions it has promised and deployed have in fact been used where they are needed to the fullest.
Four painful truths of COP27:
First, providing weather loans to poor countries is either climate aid or smart policy. It perpetuates the downward spiral of these fragile economies.
Second, the foreign network investment strategy also failed because it is necessarily rooted in a culture of waiting for express allocations to evolve and hazards to decrease without fueling them with allocation progression grants or catalytic blended finance. They wither and die before they can succeed in maturity. I have just finished a solar box in the poorest country in the world, Burundi, which supplies 10% of the country’s production capacity. Indeed, it has taken seven costly and painful years to develop, largely because the foreign network — here I will call the World Bank, the African Development Bank and the United States Trade and Development Agency — has discovered practical and certain reasons for rejecting an important solution. killing the company.
Third, when the foreign network nevertheless manages to finance climate allocations in the poorest countries, it does so painfully slow, with voluminous bidding processes instead of quick, direct, assignment-by-assignment agreements, which is not a way to scale. The solution is to invest in pan-African platforms that can produce effects in a wide diversity of markets on the floor faster than any government or budget fund or any other intermediary framework or commission or alliance or consortium to create the appearance of good governance. The weak of the climate. Water this damn tree now and it will bloom.
And fourth: Africa can be boosted through a hundred constant green energy until 2030 with an undeniable policy of replacing the foreign community: giving certainty to investors and eliminating opportunities for corruption by noting that all green energy projects in the 54 countries over the next seven years get 10 cents consistent with the kilowatt hour for 25 years. For small projects, provide grants to compensate for the lack of economies of scale. For larger projects, let investors make money; the Sahel al Kalahari.
Water that damn tree now or, at least, prevent the transformative farce that the foreign network intends to carry out on the ground.
Nominated among 12 African countries for the Nobel Peace Prize for pioneering solar energy on the continent, Yosef I. Abramowitz is CEO of Gigawatt Global, an investment impact (www. gigawattglobal. com) platform. He is an ambassador for Israel’s Climate Solution Award and can be followed @Kaptainsunshine
The perspectives expressed in this article are those of the author.
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