Failure by rich countries to honour their climate change financing commitments is directly hurting sub-Saharan Africa, with the worsening situation costing not just lives, but also $157 billion.
An analysis of a report by a lobby of laureates indicts global north countries and paints a picture of willful neglect and whose impact manifests in direct loss of life.
For example, with Kenya experiencing the worst drought in 40 years following four consecutive failed rain seasons, the UN's women's health agency, UNFPA, has said malnutrition and opportunistic diseases and deaths are at alarming levels.
At least 134,000 pregnant and breastfeeding women are reported to be acutely malnourished and in need of treatment. Amid livestock deaths and communal conflicts in the ASALs, children have borne much of the brunt as they go without food, die from preventable causes, get married off and drop out of school. The lobby known as Laureates and Leaders for Children says if the rich countries put their money where their mouths are, perhaps the situation could be different.
The report, titled Justice for Africa's Children, says that the empty or half-heartedly met promises for climate reparation date back to 2009 in the COP15 in the Danish capital, Copenhagen.
The industrial nations responsible for the destructive emissions in the last 100 years promised at the conference to avail funding to the tune of $100 billion by 2020 to help the most affected, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia to ameliorate the situation. But a 2022 review showed that $83.3 billion had been provided in climate finance - some $16.7 billion short of the target.
The lobby says the commitment of funding was based on a faulty predicate for calculating the CO2 emissions. This is because the countries have been counting the loans and grants they advance to poor countries as part of their climate change funding envisioned in the Copenhagen accord.
In addition, as a further injustice, there was real dishonesty in the purported figures provided at COP: High-income countries were counting loans rather than grants - worsening the debt burden. Much of the 'new' money came from existing development funding.
"Diverting funds from health and education for marginalised children in Africa was not what was promised. Some donors counted the full costs of projects which only had a limited climate component," the document reads.
Conference after conference, the bulk of the poor countries do not have much to take home because the agreements are not in their favour. The funding is not just inadequate and the commitments not met, the poor countries are also not fairly represented in the bodies deliberating about confronting the impacts of the climate extremities.
"Swift action must be taken to finance and operationalise this fund, otherwise it risks being another half-empty climate finance pot: No commitment was agreed at COP27 to make up the failure to deliver the $100 billion annual target," the Nobel laureates says.
-Mr Ajuok is a Project Consultant
