Africa’s GDP may fall by 30pc due to climate change, warns Uhuru
President Uhuru Kenyatta has cautioned that in the absence of urgent climate change adaptation action, Africa’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) risks contracting by up to 30 per cent by the year 2050.
Consequently, Uhuru has rallied the global community to support the accelerated roll out of adaptation programmes to mitigate against the growing 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 yesterday 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 pre-cursor to the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) that will be held in Glasgow, Scotland.
President Uhuru (pictured) noted despite Kenya significantly increasing the amount of financial resources invested in adaptation programs in recent years, the country needed more international support to fully implement its updated Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).
Honour pledges
“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, globally funding for climate adaptation, which in 2017 averaged around 30 billion US dollars a year, needed to be increase tenfold to meet the growing needs of vulnerable communities across the world.
Environment and Forestry Cabinet Secretary Keriako Tobiko challenged industrialised nations to honour their pledges of financing climate change mitigation and adaptation programmess in developing countries.
University of Nairobi Vice Chancellor Prof Stephen Kiama said the institution was ready to partner with other stakeholders to build the human capacities required to address the climate change challenge.
