Latest news with #CO2-equivalent
Yahoo
16-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Analysis: How to rethink climate finance for Africa
Climate finance in Africa needs a radical rethink. A year on, the world of aid and development cooperation has been upended by severe cuts to the US aid budget. Add to that acute aid fatigue in Europe. Yet Africa is still nowhere near receiving the $3 trillion experts say it needs to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change. Let's be honest: There is precious little new donor money available for climate finance. Yet, the way climate finance blueprints are currently done is totally dominated by catering to the global development bureaucracy, with limited focus on how international investors see the world and their motivations for moving capital. African countries need to rethink this paradigm of concocting complicated, over-egged strategies targeted at this bureaucracy and then, like an afterthought, inviting the private sector to sample. What they should do is ask themselves what is their 'competitive climate positioning,' and leverage that positioning to attract particular types of best-fit investors. From a 'climate finance realpolitik' standpoint, Africa's advantage is that its emissions are far below its historical fair entitlement: To meet the Paris Agreement's 2050 net-zero target, the average person must be emitting about 2.25 tons of CO2-equivalent gases by 2035. Today, 35 African countries emit less than 0.8 tons per capita. In effect, it has a massive unused emissions quota to attract industries from the West that need more time to adjust to their home countries' net zero targets. In other words, Africa is strategically positioned to attract a considerable proportion of the West's 'transitional brown' industries. These are manufacturing industries in sectors such as cement, lime, and industrial chemicals that emit super-high amounts of carbon per dollar of revenue but should, by 2050, have transitioned to greener processes. Smart African countries should be able to leverage their unused carbon quotas together with other strategic reforms to attract such companies in droves. Tax resources generated by expanded manufacturing GDP can then go to fund the climate-transition currently stuck due to the absence of financing, thereby reducing Africa's per capita emissions rate back to 0.8 tons by 2050 — just when it actually needs to.
Al Jazeera
11-04-2025
- Business
- Al Jazeera
UN agrees deal on shipping emissions despite US threats
Countries at the United Nations shipping agency have struck a deal on a global fuel emissions standard for the maritime sector, which will impose an emissions fee on ships that breach it and reward vessels burning cleaner fuels. The United States pulled out of the climate talks at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) in London this week, urging other countries to do the same and threatening to impose 'reciprocal measures' against any fees charged to US ships. Despite that, other nations have approved the CO2-cutting measures to help meet the IMO's target to cut net emissions from international shipping by 20 percent by 2030 and eliminate them by 2050. A majority of countries at the IMO voted on Friday to approve a scheme that from 2028 will charge ships a penalty of $380 per metric tonne on every extra tonne of CO2-equivalent they emit above a fixed emissions threshold, plus a penalty of $100 a tonne on emissions above a stricter emissions limit. The deal is expected to generate up to $40bn in fees from 2030, some of which will go towards making expensive zero-emission fuels more affordable. The talks have exposed deep rifts between governments over how fast to push the maritime sector to cut its environmental effect. A proposal for a stronger carbon levy on all shipping emissions, backed by climate-vulnerable Pacific countries – which abstained in Friday's vote – plus the European Union and the UK, was dropped after opposition from several countries, including China, Brazil and Saudi Arabia, delegates told the Reuters news agency. Vanuatu's climate minister, Ralph Regenvanu, said countries had 'failed to support a set of measures that would have gotten the shipping industry onto a 1.5°C pathway'. Industry group the International Chamber of Shipping welcomed the deal, which it said would require a huge scale-up of such fuels. 'We are pleased that governments have understood the need to catalyse and support investment in zero emission fuels,' ICS said in a statement. In 2030, the main emissions limit will require ships to cut the emissions intensity of their fuel by 8 percent compared with a 2008 baseline, while the stricter standard will demand a 21 percent reduction. By 2035, the main standard will cut fuel emissions by 30 percent, versus 43 percent for the stricter standard. Ships that reduce emissions to below the stricter limit will be rewarded with credits that they can sell to non-compliant vessels. 'This is a groundbreaking moment for the shipping industry, which should signal a turning of the tide on greenhouse gases from global shipping,' Mark Lutes, senior adviser at the NGO World Wildlife Fund for Nature, said in a statement. 'However, key aspects of this agreement fall short of what is needed and risk blowing the transition off course,' he added. The carbon pricing measure must now be formally adopted at an IMO assembly in October.
