World Bank Unveils $16B Climate Change Plan For Africa

The World Bank on Tuesday announced a $16 billion plan to help African nations tackle climate change and assist them in their efforts to produce clean energy. The Africa Climate Business Plan (ACBP) will outline steps for protecting land, water, cities and humans from negative effects of climate change, including extreme weather.

The ACBP will summarize ways to adapt faster to climate change, according to a statement from the World Bank. It added that $5 billion to $10 billion a year would be required for the continent to adapt to a 2-degree Celsius rise in temperatures. If the warming increases by 4 degrees Celsius, the needed amount could be close to $100 billion, it said. The current funding for adaptation in Africa is at most $3 billion, which is just “a fraction of the needs,” the bank said, in the statement.

The World Bank said that it “aims to raise awareness and accelerate resource mobilization for priority climate-resilient and low-carbon initiatives in Africa. It contains initiatives being promoted by the International Development Association (IDA), which will leverage as much as possible the support of other parts of the World Bank Group, in particular IFC (International Finance Corporation) and MIGA (Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency).”

The proposals for ACBP, which will include building more renewable energy forms and early warning systems, will be presented at the 21st United Nations Conference on Climate Change that starts on Monday in Paris. World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said, according to Bloomberg, that the global climate agreement at the U.N. talks would also take into account the fact that African nations have unfairly suffered from global warming.

"Any African leader will tell you that they’ve had very little role putting the carbon in the air," Kim said Tuesday, according to Bloomberg, adding: "But they’ve suffered most from the impact of climate change."

Of the $16 billion, $5.7 billion is estimated to come from the IDA, owned by the World Bank, for the period 2016-2020, the statement said. It added that more results could be achieved in the longer run by 2025, if the funding is increased to $21 billion. The bank also seeks to raise about $2.2 billion from various international climate funds, $2 billion through donations from different governments and development communities, about $3.5 billion from the private sector and about $0.7 billion from domestic sources in Africa, Reuters reported. The bank would also need about $2 billion to deliver the plan.

The ACBP is also expected to contribute to the World Bank’s target of increasing its involvement in climate-change financing by one-third, from 21 percent to 28 percent by 2020.

"While adapting to climate change and mobilizing the necessary resources remain an enormous challenge, the plan represents a critical opportunity to support a priority set of climate-resilient initiatives in Africa," Makhtar Diop, the World Bank's vice president for Africa, said, according to Reuters.