By Ebi Kesiena
As the first Africa Climate Summit opened on Monday in Kenya, US climate envoy John Kerry told the climate summit that climate change remains one of the most dangerous issues in all of human history.
The US envoy added that climate change was impacting mostly Africa and other low lying status nations.
According to Kerry, there are so many different ways in which climate change has affected Africa, causing people to get in small boats and drowning in the Mediterranean or moving across borders and running into conflict zones that cost them their lives.
“It is impossible to have a just transition, which you hear from the mouths of public people all the time. It is impossible to have that just transition if there is no justice in what is happening on a daily basis to the lives of people most affected by the crisis,” Kerry said.
Kerry spoke on the first day of Africa’s first climate summit where leaders are pushing market-based financing instruments such as carbon credits and debt-for-nature swaps in a bid to mobilize funding that they say has been slow to arrive from rich-world donors.
Several speakers at the summit said they had seen little progress toward accelerating climate financing. Africa has received only about 12% of the finance it needs to cope with climate impacts, according to a report last year by the non-profit Climate Policy Initiative.
Although, many African campaigners have opposed the summit’s approach to climate finance, saying it advances Western priorities at the expense of the continent.
However, the aim is to showcase Africa as a destination for climate investment rather than just a victim of floods, drought and famine.
