African nations say clear targets on adaptation are key demand from Cop28

Continent wants greater leeway to continue burning fossil fuels in bid to eradicate poverty

The UN says 12 million people in Ethiopia, 5.6 million in Somalia and 4.3 million in Kenya are 'acutely food insecure' after years of drought. All photos: Eduardo Soteras / AFP

The region's people, many of them herders and subsistence farmers, are enduring their fifth consecutive poor rainy season

The UN says 1.7 million people have been driven from their homes by a lack of water and pasture

The Horn of Africa is one of the regions most vulnerable to climate change, and extreme weather events are occurring with increased frequency and intensity

Eight of the 13 past rainy seasons have brought below average rainfall, according to the Climate Hazards Centre in the US

That has brought hardship for millions

The last famine was declared in Somalia in 2011, when 260,000 people - half of them children under the age of six - died of hunger, partly because the international community did not act fast enough, says the UN

Crops were ravaged by a locust invasion between 2019 and 2021. They have since been wiped out, while livestock has also suffered

UN humanitarian agency OCHA estimated in November that 9.5 million cattle had died

The war in Ukraine has contributed to soaring food and fuel costs, disrupted global supply chains and diverted aid money away from the region

Somalia has been hit hardest, with the drought affecting more than half of its population - about 7.85 million people

In December, OCHA said the nation was not yet in the grip of full-blown famine thanks to the response of aid agencies and local communities

But people were nevertheless suffering "catastrophic" food shortages, it said, and if assistance was not scaled up, famine could be expected in southern Somalia as soon as April

Rural people in Baidoa and Burhakaba districts, and displaced people in Baidoa town and the capital Mogadishu were most at risk

OCHA said that by June, the number of people at risk of starvation was expected to more than triple to 727,000 from October

According to the UN children's agency Unicef, almost two million children across Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia require urgent treatment for severe acute malnutrition, the deadliest form of hunger

It said in September that 730 children had died between January and July in nutrition centres in Somalia, but that the real numbers were likely to be much higher

Lacking water, milk and food, and often living in squalid conditions, the youngest become so weak they are vulnerable to diseases such as measles and cholera

Unicef said 2.7 million children had stopped going to school

'There is no end in sight for the hunger crisis and hope is slowly fizzling out,' said Xavier Joubert, Ethiopia director for the British charity Save the Children

'There's no doubt that the need has grown to an enormous scale,' he said, in an urgent call for funding

Only 55.5 percent of the $5.9 billion sought by the UN to tackle the crisis has been provided

Early humanitarian action averted a famine in Somalia in 2017

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African nations have said they will not agree to a Cop28 global stocktake text unless it includes clear adaptation targets.

Collins Nzovu, chairman of the African Group of Negotiators on Climate Change (AGN), said members would sign an agreement only if it had a suitable framework for the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA).

The GGA is a part of the global stocktake, an assessment of where the world is on dealing with climate change and an outline of measures needed.

It reflects the concern some African states share that adaptation, rather than mitigation, was the first issue they highlighted after the release on Monday of an updated draft global stocktake text.

"If we are serious about saving lives, livelihoods and protecting ecosystems, then the GGA framework must have ambitious, time-bound targets with clear means of support for implementation," said Mr Nzovu, the Zambian Minister of Green Economy and Environment.

He said African nations could not agree to an adaptation framework featuring "process-based targets" without specified outcomes. Targets must be "measurable and time-bound".

Main ambitions

Key aspirations for African nations – such as reducing climate-induced water scarcity, ensuring climate-resilient food production and reducing climate impacts on health – are described in draft text as ambitions to be achieved "by 2030 and beyond".

Adaptation measures, designed to help societies adjust to climate change happening now or expected in future, include growing crops more suited to drought, installing early-warning systems for cyclones and building defences to cope with rising sea-levels or other flooding risks.

African delegates at Cop28 have highlighted the effects climate change is having on their continent, including extreme temperatures and water shortages.

In recent years, the Horn of Africa has been one of the hardest-hit areas, suffering repeated droughts as well as extreme rain and heavy flooding.

"Despite the strain on our budgets and the increasing burden of debt, our governments have committed significant domestic resources on adaptation," Mr Nzovu added.

"However, only scaled-up, adequate and predictable international public finance can close the widening gap. Means of implementation is therefore the cornerstone for realising the GGA and its framework.

"Africa cannot accept a GGA framework without means of implementation from developed countries for developing countries, especially on the targets."

'Bifurcation'

Many richer nations have reservations about "bifurcation", in which there are clear distinctions between developed and developing countries in their responsibilities to reach net zero.

Arlette Soudan-Nonault, the Republic of Congo's minister of the environment, sustainable development and the Congo basin, said that Africa was the part of the world "most impacted" by climate change.

Yet, despite the importance of the Congo basin as a carbon sink, she said that the area struggled to secure funds to cope with a changing climate and to limit its own emissions.

"We need funding to get resilient agriculture and because of the displacement of people as a result of floods. We're really impacted because of these things," she said.

"We have investment plans, but we have a lot of difficulty to get the funds. A lot of promises are made but not kept."

As well as for adaptation, Ms Soudan-Nonault said that the Republic of Congo, which is an oil exporter, also needed better access to finance to support mitigation or efforts to limit its own greenhouse gas emissions.

"We need solutions to get the ecological transition and the energy transition," she said. "We want to raise funds to restore our ecosystems."

Ms Soudan-Nonault said that a promise made at Cop15 in Copenhagen in 2009 that $100 billion of climate finance would be made available each year to support mitigation and adaptation in developing nations was "not kept".

Another issue highlighted by Mr Nzovu of the AGN is that the move to net-zero emissions and any phase-out of fossil fuels must involve "differentiated pathways" between nations.

The global stocktake text must, he added, "recognise the full right of Africa to exploit its natural resources sustainably" in line with the continent’s "poverty eradication needs".

Poorer nations want more time to continue using fossil fuels because their historical emissions are much lower and they have a greater need to develop their economies. Africa’s current greenhouse gas emissions are about 4 per cent of the world’s total.