President Uhuru Kenyatta has cautioned that in the abs ence of urgent climate change adaptation action, Africa’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) risks contracting by up to 30 percent by 2050.
According to Kenya’s Head of State, evidence indicates that climate change will have a devastating socio-economic impact across the world and quite severely in Africa.
Consequently, the President rallied the global community to support the accelerated rollout of adaptation programmes in Africa to mitigate against the growing adverse effects of climate change and strengthen the continent’s resilience.
“While it is relatively more difficult to design and implement adaptation projects and while fewer resources are currently available for adaptation, we should not lose sight of the fact that adaptation is, without doubt, smart economics,” he said.
The Head of State’s message was contained in a recorded video address delivered Tuesday at a hybrid conference hosted by the University of Nairobi in partnership with the Global Centre on Adaptation (GCA) to celebrate the Africa Adaptation Acceleration Day, a precursor to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) that will be held in Glasgow, Scotland.
President Kenyatta pointed out that despite Kenya significantly increasing the number of financial resources invested in adaptation programs in recent years, the country needed more international support to implement its updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) fully.
“To implement our NDCs, we plan to invest approximately US$8 billion over the next 10 years. This is just 10 percent of the total investment needed of the NDCs and we, therefore, need support from our international partners,” the President said.
He observed that the financing challenge is not peculiar to Kenya, saying that globally funding for climate adaptation, which in 2017 averaged around 30 billion US dollars a year, needed to be increased tenfold to meet the growing needs of vulnerable communities worldwide.
“Indications are that for an investment of 800 million US dollars in developing countries in climate adaptation programmes would result in benefits of up to 16 billion US dollars per year,” the President noted.
Kenyatta pointed out that Covid-19 had exacerbated the funding situation with countries worldwide collectively allocating over 20 trillion US dollars to the pandemic, thereby significantly reducing resources available to combat climate change.
“However, climate change cannot wait while we address COVID19; we must address the two challenges together. Indeed, to make recovery truly sustainable, we need to institute green recovery measures th at integrate adaptation and mitigation measures,” the President said.
