In mid-July, at least 35 environmental ministers and representatives from 53 African countries, including representatives from the African Union, UN agencies, African Development Bank and partners, converged at the United Nations Office at Nairobi (UNON) for the African Ministerial Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) 20th ordinary session. While marking the conference’s 40-year milestone since its inception in 1985, leaders used the occasion not merely for reflection, but as a pivotal platform for an urgent call to unify in the face of escalating climate shocks and the persistent inequities in climate finance.
This year’s AMCEN meeting was convened under the theme “Four Decades of Environmental Action in Africa: Reflecting on the Past and Imagining the Future.” To grasp the weight of AMCEN’s role today, we must journey back to December 1985, when ministers from across the continent met in Cairo, Egypt. At the time, Africa was already reeling from a cascade of environmental disasters that exposed the continent’s vulnerability to climate change and ecological degradation. Within this sobering context, ministers chose to speak with one voice and chart a shared path forward for the Continent.
Africa’s contribution to emissions
Africa’s position on climate change is of great significance because even though it contributes least to greenhouse gas emissions, it is hardest hit by climate impacts. In the margins of AMCEN-20, Simon Stiell, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat, in a speech delivered by Cecilia Kinuthia-Njenga, UNFCCC Intergovernmental Support and Collective Progress, emphasised this disproportion, “The impacts of the rising temperature, extreme weather, droughts, floods, and loss of livelihoods are still a reality, particularly in Africa, the region most vulnerable to climate change despite contributing the least to the problem.”
Africa’s critical role in global climate action
The urgency of the climate crisis set the tone as speakers during the conference stressed that it is Africa’s time to rise and strongly take its rightful place in the global discourses on climate action. “After 40 years, we no longer have the excuse of youth or inexperience,” said Ibrahim Thiaw, outgoing Executive Secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). On her part, reflecting on AMCEN’s role, Rose Mwebaza, Director of UNEP’s Regional Office for Africa, lauded the achievements of this continental principal policy body: “Many people don’t know that for the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals, Africa discussed that in South Africa in 2015 and it was the pivotal continent…..when everybody says US dollars 100 billion per year until 2030, those are numbers that were given by African negotiators of what it would take to deal with climate change. It has been 40 years of remarkable work.”
But this period also represents the gap between promise and reality in climate finance.
The new collective quantified goal on climate finance
At COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, for instance, African nations and their counterparts rallied for trillions in the form of climate finance owed by wealthy nations for historical emissions. After days of heated negotiations, developed nations once again fell short of making firm commitments. The climate talks closed with an agreement of US dollars 300 billion that landed far below Africa’s asks. The figure US dollars 1.3 trillion that the African government bloc was demanding in a COP hailed as “Finance COP” was a number proposed by the African group of negotiators, and was first introduced during a previous AMCEN meeting.
Africa’s climate finance gaps
Despite growing climate change-related needs, Africa receives only three to four percent of global climate finance. According to a 2025 policy brief Cuts in official development assistance: OECD projections for 2025 and the near term by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the four world’s largest providers of official development assistance (ODA), which are the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Germany and France, cut their ODA in 2024 for the first time in almost three decades, with additional cuts slated for 2025. This would result in least developed countries and countries in sub-Saharan Africa experiencing a drop in support by about 13 – 28 percent. It is on this background that African leaders are sounding the alarm over what would become of the climate financing commitments and the continent’s ability to sustain adaptation and mitigation efforts.
Loans vs grants: The challenges and concerns
African ministers reiterated calls for equitable climate finance to address Africa’s growing climate needs and a renewed call for a fundamental overhaul of international financial institutions, urging them to align with the continent’s development priorities and deliver climate finance in the form of grants and concessional funding. “A decline in ODA, however, does not need to result in a decline in Global Environment Facility (GEF) funding, and it must not, or all life on this precious planet earth will suffer, including that of we homo sapiens,” remarked Dr Fred Bolz, the Head of Programming at the GEF. They pushed back firmly against debt-heavy solutions, warning that loan-based financing is not aid but a burden—one that’s already driving many African nations deeper into financial distress. Dr Richard Muyungi, who chairs the African Group of Negotiators (AGN) and advisor to the President of Tanzania, said that they are very intent on seeing the promises become tangible actions through a roadmap that will be presented in Belem at the COP30. The roadmap, he quipped, “must be anchored in Articles of the Convention and Paris Agreement that call for provisions of financial resources rooted in equity and historical responsibility rather than just mobilisation of such resources that has increased debt burden for many countries across the continent.”
The climate funding, he added, must come in the form of a “ grant as opposed to a loan or at least concessional lending which has been agreed in the Paris Agreement. So indeed, I would say we are not sure whether that 300 billion will be provided in the way we want, but we are going to continue the discussions of provision vis-a-vis mobilisation in Baku as one of the areas.”
