COP29: Africa Demands ‘Grants Not Loans’ to Confront Climate Crisis

As talks hit the mid-way point at this year’s United Nations climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, African leaders and activists have called for a shift from loan-tied climate funding to grant-based solutions, to address the continent’s climate crisis. Dozens of climate groups from across the continent under the aegis of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), asked world leaders to refrain from increasing the continent’s debt burden with loan instruments disguised as climate finance… [Mithika Mwenda, PACJA’s Executive Director] noted that the climate finance to be secured under the new collective quantified goal (NCQG), ought to contribute to climate justice rather than Africa’s growing debt portfolio…A report by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) puts this in perspective: African countries and their counterparts in the world’s poorest and most climate-vulnerable regions service their debts with twice as much as they receive to mitigate their climate crisis. This reality makes loan-based financing an unsustainable and unsuitable solution.