Green investors bypass Africa

Mail & Guardian (South Africa), via UN Africa Renewal: ... [A]ccording to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Secretariat, the UN agency that oversees the [Clean Development Mechanism, or] CDM, Africa accounts for only about 3% of the more than 1 000 CDM-approved projects globally -- and half those are in South Africa, whose sophisticated industrial and financial infrastructure lends itself to the complex CDM approval process.

Africa's difficulties in attracting CDM projects are similar to those that have hampered the continent's efforts to land purely commercial investments. Those include a lack of infrastructure, high poverty rates, limited financial resources, a shortage of the management and technical skills, weak government institutions, corruption and political instability.

African governments and environmentalists also note that the CDM's rules favour pollution-reducing projects rather than those that could help Africa cope with climate change, such as irrigation schemes and flood-control programmes. Such projects are instead to be financed by the Kyoto Protocol's Adaptation Fund, financed in part by a 2% levy on CDM credits.

…Under the current system, [says Ogunlade Davidson, a leading African environmental scientist and dean of postgraduate studies at the University of Sierra Leone], investors are able to "piggyback" carbon emissions credits on to commercial projects in countries such as China and India that are already attracting high levels of foreign investment. That is one reason so many CDM projects are located in Asia, he declares, and so few in sub-Saharan Africa.

Even more alarming, Davidson observes, is the failure of the CDM to require industrialised countries to actually cut their carbon emissions at home. "It's a major flaw. Developed countries need to reduce their emissions by 90%. We need more drastic action. Market forces alone cannot deliver the reductions needed. Markets caused the problem in the first place."

The CDM can be improved through reform of its criteria and procedures and tighter requirements for domestic emissions reductions, Davidson says. The mechanism also needs to be supplemented by programmes to make green technologies available to developing countries, tougher action against Northern greenhouse-gas emissions and more funding for adaptation….

A compressed satellite photo of Africa, NASA, Wikimedia Commons