Key highlights
- Over 1.3 billion people in Africa are serviced by an installed capacity of 244 gigawatts which is less than the 248 gigawatts available for Germany’s population of 83 million.
- Africa can actually pursue a green course of growth without worrying about costly legacy infrastructure.
- Africa can become a hugely competitive green manufacturing and energy hub for the world.
Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo, has revealed that Africa can leverage 3 major pathways including low emissions consumption, and production as well as a competitive green manufacturing and energy hub for the world, in order to achieve climate-positive growth.
The Vice President made this known via a statement, after his special lecture at the Center for African Studies, at the University of Pennsylvania.
Adaptation and Challenges
The Vice President noted that African nations are faced with climate justice with narrow options, he said:
- “ For African countries, the remedy that climate justice offers appears to be rather narrow: adaptation, or more recently, loss and damage compensation, but for African countries, a challenge that is as important as containing climate change itself is energy poverty, which essentially means lack of access to energy for electricity, cooking, heating, cooling, etc, and how this inhibits any real growth or job opportunities.
He added that Over 1.3 billion people in Africa are serviced by an installed capacity of 244 gigawatts which is less than the 248 gigawatts available for Germany’s population of 83 million.
“Sub-Saharan Africa remains the only region in which the number of people without access to clean cooking fuels and technologies is rising. 19 of the 20 countries with the lowest clean cooking access rates are in Africa.”
Pathways
He further disclosed that there are 3 major pathways towards climate-positive growth in Africa if measures including Africa’s endowments, renewable energy, natural resources, and a young workforce are examined, added:
These pathways include the following:
- Low emissions consumption and production, the point being that Africa can, instead of going the carbon-intensive path to providing energy, goods, and services for its own needs, takes full advantage of green technologies and practices. There is the distinct advantage that Africa can actually pursue a green course of growth without worrying about costly legacy infrastructure.“This would, of course, mean a wide range of changes in eating, living, (city designs), and transportation (electric cars) and different habits must occur. An example of an actual project is in Kenya with the use of low-cost bio-ethanol fueled cookstoves.”
- The second pathway is that having recognized the fact that global zero carbon ambitions cannot be realized without intentional carbon removal technologies and practices, Africa can ramp up her own potential to do this at scale through a combination of planned land use and ecosystem management, and investment in emerging engineered removal technologies. Already Africa’s large carbon sinks, currently store years of global emissions, and the abundant supply of unused agricultural waste is available as biomass for clean energy production and soil improvement.
- The third pathway is that, with its abundant reserves of renewable energy and raw materials, Africa can become a hugely competitive green manufacturing and energy hub for the world that could also accelerate the greening of global industry. For example, by on-shore processing of 110 million tons of bauxite to aluminum, currently exported as raw bauxite from Africa to Europe and Asia, using renewable energy, between 1.3 to 1.5 gigatons of CO2e emissions can be avoided annually. Same as processing lithium within the mining locality.
He added that some efforts are being made in Kaduna, Nigeria, where a lithium processing factory is being built.
- “And as green hydrogen costs fall, African manufacturing locations may become more competitive in a range of related value chains, for example, for ammonia, fertilizer, and eFuels.
- “Energy poverty can only be resolved if there is a significant investment in renewable energy. That can only happen if we create the energy-intense anchor demand that makes the investment in additional renewable energy bankable” he added.