Investment in African Renewable Energy

Up to 2.4 million people will get electricity in their homes for the first time, following an agreement made by the UK government to invest £100 million in sub-Saharan Africa.

Announced at COP24, it was part of a drive to identify how almost 200 signatories to the Paris Agreement could get a handle on the rise of global temperatures. The goal is to cap it at no more than 1.5C for this century.

The UK’s Energy and Clean Growth Minister Claire Perry said: “At home we’re world leaders in cutting emissions while growing our economy and abroad we’re showing our international leadership by giving countries a helping hand to shift to greener, cleaner economies.

“This £100 million will help communities harness the power of their natural resources to provide hundreds of thousands of people with electricity for the first time. Building these clean, reliable sources of energy will also create thousands of quality jobs in these growing green economies.”

Up to 40 projects will benefit from the funding, and are in addition to projects already being supported such as a hydropower project situated on the Nzoia River in Kenya which the government says created 330 jobs and provides energy to 290,000 people, and mini grids in Nigeria which aims to provide 72 rural villages with pay-as-you-go clean energy when it’s up and running, delivering 2500 jobs during construction and 430 afterwards.

It is some good news from a conference which was on the whole criticised by campaigners for lacking ambition and clarity on key issues. As the meeting postponed decisions on pledging more ambitious action to fight global warming and on regulating the market for international carbon emissions trading, scientists warned that emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide need to drop sharply by 2030 to prevent potentially catastrophic global warming.

Jennifer Morgan, executive director at Greenpeace International, said: “A year of climate disasters and a dire warning from the world’s top scientists should have led to so much more.

“Instead, governments let people down again as they ignored the science and the plight of the vulnerable. Recognising the urgency of raised ambition and adopting a set of rules for climate action is not nearly enough when whole nations face extinction.”

Gareth Redmond-King, head of climate change at WWF-UK, said world leaders were in a “state of denial” about the problem. They’ve made important progress, but what we’ve seen in Poland reveals a fundamental lack of understanding by some countries of our current crisis. Luckily, the Paris Agreement is proving to be resilient to the storms of global geopolitics. Now we need all countries to commit to raising climate ambition before 2020, because everyone’s future is at stake.”