Advisor – Africa Climate Summit
Closing: May 15, 2023
Published: May 5, 2023 (8 days ago)
Job Requirements
Education: Bachelor’s degree
Work experience: 5 years
Language skills: English
Job Summary
Contract Type: Full time, Fixed term
Background
Kenya is set to host the first Africa Climate Summit following an announcement by HE. President William Ruto, the current Chair of the Committee of African Heads of State and Government on Climate Change (CAHOSCC) under the auspices of the African Union.
The objective of the Summit is to bring together African Heads of State to define priorities for COP 28, setting priority areas for Africa on Climate Change while highlighting opportunities and barriers for climate investment in the continent. The summit is an innovative multi-stakeholder platform going beyond COPs’ framework for intergovernmental engagement and consensus on climate, to develop innovative actions and partnerships, especially with the private sector. The Summit will catalyze actions that will inform follow-up formal processes like COP 28.
To coordinate the Africa Climate Summit, a Secretariat has been established Chaired by Kenya’s Climate Change Directorate (CCD) with membership from AUC and other relevant Kenya government Ministries. The Secretariat is to engage partners as well as to plan the end-to-end execution of the summit.
The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH is supporting the Ministry of Environment, Climate Change and Forestry (MoECCF) to plan and execute the
Summit. With an estimated 5,000 attendees from across the continent and the global south, and only five months to go, the Government of Kenya needs immediate and urgent support to ensure successful execution of the Summit.
Context
The global geopolitical context defined by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, the COVID-19, deepening debt crisis, and the food and cost-of-living crisis have exacerbated the climate crisis, now universally accepted as the 21st century threat to the survival of humanity and the health of the planet.
This is playing against a background aptly captured by 6th assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-ARVI) released in March 2023, that warns of dire consequences if humanity continues with unsustainable modes of production and consumption dominated by fossil fuel addiction, and which identifies, once again, the African region as the most vulnerable, projected to experience more frequent and intense heat waves,
droughts, floods, storms, and wildfires under all emissions scenarios.
The lingering debt crisis among many African countries and other Least Developed Countries (LDCs), coupled with the growing need to invest significantly among of GDP (5-9%) to cushion populations suffering from the severest form of losses and damages, is also a context of relevance as the momentum builds towards the ACS and COP28, which, undoubtedly, happens in quite a difficult geopolitical context.
In addition to ending with the historic agreement to establish a new fund for loss and damage to assist climate-vulnerable countries, the COP27 affirmed the acknowledgement that structural reform of the international financial architecture was needed to better respond to the “global climate emergency”. In addition, the delegates representing all countries in Sharm-El-Sheikh highlighted that further action to scale up finance, enable just economic transitions and strengthening early warning systems to mitigate disaster risk was urgently needed.
However, despite these breakthroughs, the overall outcome of COP27 did not go far enough to address the scale of the climate emergency, especially in the context of reducing climate impacts, firming up global goal for adaptation and building long-term resilience in climate-vulnerable countries and communities. Most notably, there were no significant actions taken towards drastically curbing emissions, which is critical to reaching the Paris Agreement goal of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
This background, therefore, demands bold action to steer Africa towards a climate-resilient, socially-just, decarbonized future for political, economic, and environmental stability of the continent. In addition, Africa wants to build robust adaptive capacity to manage current and future climate threats.
