Africa plans green fund, seeks new funding methods

By Christian Ntsoumou

BRAZZAVILLE (Reuters) – Africa will create a fund to
promote its unique environment and seek new ways of funding
green reforms such as carbon credits and canceling debts in
return for conservation, ministers said.

Africa has large areas of ecologically valuable rainforests
and other habitat with many unique plant and animal species,
but despite a small industrial base its environment faces many
pressures including logging, climate change and poaching.

“We have decided to create an African Environmental Fund to
promote sustainable development. This fund will be housed with
the African Development Bank,” Republic of Congo’s Environment
Minister Henri Djombo said late on Friday at the close of a
biannual meeting of environment ministers from across Africa.

Djombo appealed for help from the African Development Bank
(AfDB) and other international financial institutions to assist
with setting up the fund, which would channel resources into
conservation efforts on the poorest continent.

“However, other means will have to be explored, namely
innovative finance mechanisms used by countries in other
continents like Latin America, such as carbon credits and
exchanging debt for environmental services,” he said.

Carbon credits allow companies who reduce their greenhouse
gas emissions to earn reduction credits which they can then
sell to firms in developed countries.

The scheme grew out of the United Nations Kyoto Protocol
under which most developed countries have committed themselves
to targets to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases blamed
for climate change.

Kyoto signatories are meant to cut emissions by an average
of 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12 as a small step to
combat rising temperatures that many scientists say could cause
more floods, desertification and violent storms and raise sea
levels by almost a meter (yard) by 2100.

Environment ministers pledged in a closing statement at the
Brazzaville meeting to reinforce their efforts under the United
Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

Africa’s biodiversity will be in the spotlight at a global
conference in Madagascar next month which will examine ways to
harness its ecological treasures for economic development.

Djombo, who took over as chair of the African Ministerial
Conference on the Environment (AMCEN) until 2008, proposed an
African environment award for people working toward better
management of the continent’s ecosystems.

AMCEN is due to meet next in South Africa, which as the
continent’s most industrialized country has spearheaded carbon
credit trading in Africa and has one of its most developed
systems of national parks and ecotourism.

South Africa has called for “positive incentives” to
encourage developing nations to curb emissions, including aid
and new technology.