What dampened Africa’s prospects for money in Bonn climate talks

The key highlight of Kenya's delegation in the recently concluded climate change meeting in Bonn, Germany was the election of Ambassador Ali Mohamed as the chairperson of the African Group of Negotiators. The move handed Kenya the crucial role of leading the continent in the intense diplomatic onslaught that will be climaxed by the main annual climate conference  — COP29 —  scheduled to take place in November in  Baku, Azerbaijan.

Mr Mohamed is President William Ruto's special envoy on Climate Change.

The election of Mr Mohamed, a seasoned civil servant, was a relief to African stakeholders, who were worried that the disagreement between Kenya and Tanzania, which played out since Dubai's COP28, was exposing the continent’s underbelly when it comes to unity in international diplomatic and political interactions.

In a compromise struck in Bonn, Mr Mohamed will serve as the chairman of the group till March next year, while Dr Richard Muyungi, Tanzania's President Samia Suluhu's special Climate Change advisor, will take up the mantle until the end of 2025, leading the group to COP30 in Belem, Brazil.

In addition to the last-ditch effort to resolve the leadership crisis to amplify Africa's voice in the negotiations, the exceedingly international geopolitical landscape seemed to be another source of headache for the diplomats navigating the fluid conversations at the Bonn-based headquarters of the United Nations Convention on Climate Change.

The 60th sessions of both the Subsidiary Body for Implementation and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, popularly known as SB60, were held amid a cloud of anxiety surrounding European Union (EU) elections, where the bloc has witnessed a historic shift to the populist, nationalist, xenophobic and racist right-wing movement, which campaigned on anti-migrant and anti-climate rhetoric.

At the heart of the right-wing bigotry is broad denial and misinformation about climate science, including incitement of EU farmers against radical proposals governments and technocrats in Brussels have proposed to dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions consistent with what scientists warn is safe levels.

Massive protests by European farmers have been witnessed in many countries and the EU commission's offices in Brussels over unfair policies imposed as part of EU obligations under the Paris Agreement. The far-right has exploited this dissatisfaction to spike voters' emotions, sparking tectonic political aberration that threatens the political future of French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Olof Scholz, among other high-profile political casualties.

Few rich countries are yet to meet their Official Development Assistance (ODA) obligations, and this will be the first casualty in the ensuing melee sparked by the right-wing movement, which is emboldened by the gains in elections in countries and the EU. Development cooperation is gradually shifting from aid to trade, and as the saying goes, there is no free lunch again for African and developing countries.

This is the cryptic message conveyed in Bonn's SB60. Climate finance, the means of implementation upon which all parties agree, should be provided in adequacy and urgency to address the climate crisis, which has remained a hot potato from the opening of the sessions to the end. The African Group of Negotiators has declared COP29 as the COP for climate finance, hoping to elevate the subject as the main priority issue moving into Baku. However, as development aid faces an uncertain future owing to the changing political dynamics in the West, so will climate finance.

Discussions about the Global Goal on Adaptation and the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) on climate finance faced delays and postponement as delegates from the South and those from the North rigidly held on to their positions. Developing countries, together with civil society, accused rich countries of applying double standards and shifting goalposts when honouring their obligations, both in deep emissions reduction and provision of climate finance.

Developed countries are emitting increasing amounts of greenhouse gases and current targets for achieving what is referred to as net-zero emissions by 2050 are seriously short of what science and the imperatives of climate justice require. At the same time, adaptation, critically important to enhance adaptive capacity and build the resilience of those vulnerable to climate change in Africa, suffers from serious adaptation finance and national adaptation planning implementation gaps.

Kenya and other developing countries are increasingly spending their scarce funds to implement Nationally Determined Contributions and respond to the losses and damages due to climate change. There is a huge disagreement between rich countries and those from the developing world over the magical $100 billion per year by 2020, which was pledged in 2009. While the report by the Organisation of Economic Development Cooperation indicates that the money has been delivered, developing countries claim that they have never seen the money and that rich countries have justified their delivery through a process of double-counting and re-baptising the existing ODA obligations as climate finance.

Whatever the case, it is clear that the debate on climate finance will be long and complicated, picking the lesson from Bonn. The need for climate finance under the NCQG should be more pronounced in the growing debt crisis, rising food insecurity, the much-imperilled SDGs and the rising climate and health crises.

We also need to see better and more coherent linkages between Bonn's agendas and other related multilateral processes such as the Summit of the Future, COP 29, and, ultimately, COP 30 in Brazil. As these are interconnected processes playing within the context of a multipolar world, the display of mistrust during the SB60 signals a bumpy road ahead for the international climate dialogue process.

Mithika is the executive director of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance