Abstract
This chapter uses data on Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) to examine the nature of climate change mitigation and adaptation actions being pursued in African countries and assesses the extent to which preferred mitigation and adaptation priorities advance the cause of sustainable development on the continent. The prospective synergies between mitigation and adaptation approaches and sustainable development are assessed. Also, the pathways through which resource constraints and institutional and policy environment affect Africa’s ability to mitigate and adapt to climate change are examined, as well as the degree to which these constraints are being addressed. It is argued that Africa’s ability to benefit from sustainable development synergies embedded in the mitigation and adaptation strategies in the INDCs will be greatly limited by institutional and policy environment that hinders funding, capacity building, and technological innovation systems development. The slow pace of efforts to address these impediments further erodes confidence that climate adaptation in Africa will be effective at sufficiently contributing to a reduction in climate change risks to the continent.
Keywords
- Africa
- Climate change
- Mitigation and adaption
- Sustainable development
- Climate policy
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- 1.
Data based on dominant themes in INDCs. Extracting exact details from INDCs is complicated by the fact that there are no universal guidelines for designing and formatting them. Each country submits an INDC according to its understanding of the request from the UNFCCC.
- 2.
These percentages are extracted from the INDCs of the respective countries, as listed in the World Bank Database (as of July 6, 2017, http://spappssecext.worldbank.org/sites/indc/Pages/Adaptation.aspx).
- 3.
- 4.
See Nyiwul (2016) for a detailed critique of environmental regulation in African countries.
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Appendix
Appendix
Mitigation priorities in Africa
Adaptation priorities
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Nyiwul, L.M. (2019). Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation in Africa: Strategies, Synergies, and Constraints. In: Sequeira, T., Reis, L. (eds) Climate Change and Global Development. Contributions to Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02662-2_11
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