Overview
Currently, Africa stands out as the most vulnerable region to the impact of climate change. Africa is currently at the stage of building its infrastructure both at the national and regional levels, ensuring the implementation of Sustainable Development as stated in the Agenda 2063 vision, which involves addressing Africa’s development challenges including poverty reduction and job creation, expansion of modern Energy and healthcare services, Agriculture and Food Security, Water supply, Transport, ICT, Project Finance, amongst others.
The Africa Climate Resilient Infrastructure Summit 2016 (ACRIS) has been put at the heart of Africa’s urgent development plans with the ability to raise awareness, increase dialogue and bring public and private sector together.
ACRIS2016 will build on the success of 2015 and highlight key areas for Africa to strengthen in order to address the twin challenges of infrastructure development and climate change. For Africa, the messages for climate-proofing infrastructure include:
- Integrating climate-change policies into planning and implementation processes.
- Repositioning current policies to stimulate adoption of climate change strategies and opportunities in our institutional frameworks, and financial and capital markets.
- Introduction and promotion of innovative and climate financing initiatives as well as mobilising private sector participation.
- Enhancing technical capacity building that ensures technical innovations, and technology transfer and adoption.
- Informed decision-making through awareness creation, and research and development.
There are huge opportunities for international participants to integrate their technologies, services and solutions into Africa’s climate resilient development plans, since the continent is just beginning to build its own infrastructure. ACRIS provides a cost-effective medium to learn about government and private projects ready for investment and/or implementation, to undertake private, pre-scheduled one-to-one business meetings that allow for in-depth conversations on relevant projects and opportunities, a networking zone/exhibition, and a cultural gala dinner to unwind, relax and network some more.
Addressing the delegates in 2015 Mr. Jamal SAGHIR, Senior Regional Adviser said “that the World Bank had launched a global infrastructure facility in 2014 and put aside four billion USD for climate change combating measures.
Mr. Paul Desanker, Manager of the Adaptation Programme, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) highlighted that GCF has mobilized 10 billion dollars this year and is in the process of identifying projects that require funding in various regions. The projects will help facilitate the integration of climate change resilient programmes into national frameworks, thereby ensuring sustainability in the long-run.
European Investment Bank Loan Officer, Ms. Morag Baird underscored the role played by the bank to achieve sustainable development and poverty reduction around the world. Highlighting the activities of EIB, where 19 billion euro’s have been set aside for climate action alone, Ms. Baird stressed that the bank is largely involved in efforts to manage climate change with climate intervention approaches incorporated into EIBs program agenda.