The One Planet Summit will be  held in Nairobi

The One Planet Summit will  be held in Nairobi

The third edition of the One Planet Summit will be held in Nairobi ( Kenya) on the 14th of March. This event will start before the opening of the high-level segment of UNEA-A, the General Assembly of UN Environment. For the organizers of the One Planet Summit, this event will therefore highlight the challenges and opportunities of Africa in the fight against climate change .

Explanations.

By ERA ENVIRONNEMENT

The commitments

During the last edition  of the One Planet Summit held in Washington on September 2018, Spain, Canada, the UK announced that they will join the Carbon Neutrality Coalition by 2050. This Carbon Neutrality Coalition gathers 19 countries in the world willing to commit long term strategies in order to achieve the Paris Agreement’s collective’s goal by linking economy and ecology interests. This coalition will act on sectors such as transportation, energy, agriculture and land use. But it will also promote technological innovations towards emission-reduction projects.

The Former Mayor of New york and CEO of Bloomberg, Michael Bloomberg announced that he will help convene a Wall Street Network on Sustainable Finance to encourage more climate-friendly and sustainable finance innovation across the U.S. capital markets. The Wall Street Network is the latest addition to a growing roster of ‘Financial Centers for Sustainability,’ including the City of London’s Green Finance Initiative, the Paris-based Finance for Tomorrow Initiative, and over fifteen other related initiatives from China to Germany to Morocco and beyond.

The Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy, the largest international alliance of city leaders and their networks committed to raising the global ambition for climate action with a partnership with Google and Blomberg Philanthropies. This partnership will help cities with critical information about their environmental data and it will give new tools that will empower them in transports, construction, air quality. 10 000 cities will therefore have access to online data to help them to implement ambitious action plans.

The Global Convenant of Mayors will establish a program of research and innovation known as “Innovate4Cities”. This program wants to integrate cities’ implementation priorities into national, academic and private sector research, innovation and development portfolios and accelerates their abilities to meet their climate commitments.

The World Bank Group committed to invest $1 billion to accelerate the deployment of battery storage in developing countries. The initiative is expected to leverage another $4 billion in concessional funding and private sector investments, and result in 17.5 gigawatt-hours of new battery storage capacity by 2025 – more than triple the 4-5 GWh currently installed in all developing countries. The goal is to catalyze new markets for battery storage to help developing countries expand access to electricity, improve the resilience of grids, and leapfrog to a new generation of energy technology.

Last September, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres requested that President of France Emmanuel Macron, and Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness, lead efforts on climate finance over the next year, particularly in light of France’s G7 Presidency, and that his Special Envoy for Climate Action Michael R. Bloomberg will lead a high-level Climate Finance Leadership Initiative to spur more private investments in climate solutions in the lead-up to the United Nations 2019 Climate Summit.

The European Commission proposed to dedicate 25% of the next European Union budget (2021-2027), i.e. EUR 320 billion to climate objectives and foresees a dedicated financial support for sustainable infrastructure investments through  the “InvestEU” programme, expected to leverage more than EUR 150 billion. Another mobilization: the Climate Finance Partnership. It consists of a combination of philanthropies, governments, institutional investors. BlackRock, the Governments of France and Germany, and the Hewlett, Grantham, and IKEA foundations have committed to work together to combate climate change, with a investment program targeting sectors in renewable energies, energy transition, carbon stockage.

Perspective

The 14th of March will be the third edition of the One Planet Summit in Nairobi (Kenya).

Africa is responsible for only 4% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, but 65% of the African population is considered to be directly impacted by climate change.

For the organizers of the One Planet Summit, this event will therefore highlight the unique role of Africa as a global partner facing both challenges and opportunities, in particular in the field of innovative solutions for adaptation and resilience. On november 2018, Kenya co-host with Canada and Japan the first international blue economy in Nairobi. Thousands of delegates from 170 countries, including 2,000 representatives of Governors and Mayors, 1,800 business-leaders, over 1,000 scientists and researchers, and thousands of ordinary citizens, shared their knowledge and experiences, set ambitious targets and made consequential decisions and commitments. The delegates agreed to strengthen political leadership and international cooperation and have committed to work collaboratively on data analysis, information and intelligence sharing to curb the Illegal, Unregulated and Unreported threat and other threats to African marine resources.