An Uber-like app that hails tractors for agriculture, developed in Kenya, a process turning a seaweed that is choking the Caribbean’s shores into fertiliser and using a resin from plastic waste to strengthen concrete.
These are some of the “unsung” innovative solutions being pioneered in Africa and the Caribbean to help cut emissions and need to be highlighted, according to United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change Global Ambassador Racquel Moses.
As COP27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, draws closer, Moses, who is the chief executive of Caribbean Climate-Smart Accelerator, wants more conversations to be had on how developing economies in the Caribbean and Africa can help each other fight climate change.
‘Moral high ground’
Both regions stand to be hit particularly hard by a changing climate, yet have contributed little to global carbon emissions. “In terms of what are the opportunities for working together, one of the things that we share in common is a bit of the moral high ground in that we understand what needs to happen for our own survival,” said Moses, who is from Trinidad and Tobago. “And, even if we all got our net emissions to zero it wouldn’t change anything. The big emitters, we have to help them on this journey of getting to zero, as well.
“The other thing that we have in common is that we are underdogs in that we’re not the ones necessarily setting the narrative at this point,” she said, pointing to lack of awareness behind this. “And that’s unfortunate because again, we’re on the frontlines and are very vulnerable.”
What both Africa and the Caribbean boast, she said, is a lot of innovation — some of which is unsung — and a great deal of capacity for strength in numbers. “So, whereas individually if we are advocating, it can fall on deaf ears; together, if we collaborate, we have the ability to set the tone for things like how loss and damage [the unavoidable effects of climate change that countries cannot adapt to] is handled.”
Moses said the accelerator is working with Mozambique to share climate solutions that are applicable in both places and at “how we can amplify each other’s access to climate action funding to support climate adaptation”.
“There is so much adaptation that needs to take place whether it’s in agriculture or prevention of flooding or drought. And, so how do we share these solutions across both the small island developing states and the African states so that we have access to the best solutions, that we are sharing the solutions that we develop so that our entrepreneurs have more opportunities.”
Collaboration between the regions is already in progress. An example is a coalition where small island states are working with African countries to attract funding to regenerate agricultural practices.
Getting more airtime
She said uch of this work is focused on raising awareness about the innovation that’s unfolding in Africa and the Caribbean so that they “get more airtime”.
“When you read the main newspapers, it’s a lot of information about ‘oh well, Germany has cut emissions’ and ‘France is doing this’ and somebody else is doing that and you rarely ever hear about the African nations or the Caribbean nations, who are also making a lot of headway.”
She cited how Costa Rica is one of only seven countries on the planet that can almost run entirely on renewable energy “but you hear very little about that … You rarely ever hear about Guyana, which is a net carbon sink … And we have to change that. So there’s strength in numbers and strength in our potential collaboration.”
Last November, Africa and Small Island Developing States launched a coalition to attract funding to help half a billion farmers implement regenerative agricultural practices over the next decade. “This is exactly the kind of collaboration that we support,” Moses said.
Climate ‘colonialism’
She said the media “definitely could do a better job of being informed” and having less of a Western, Global North focus. “We see our role of raising awareness and highlighting the achievements of the underdogs”.
Western nations cannot be the sole beneficiaries of the solutions that are coming out of the transition. “You can’t be the only one who benefits from the problem that you’ve caused. It’s not justice and it’s proliferating a different level of colonialism.
“Many of us have been colonised and we continue to suffer from that colonisation. And what happens, in this now climate colonisation, is that all of the solutions that are being highlighted and pushed are from the nations that were former colonisers as well as other nations that emitted the carbon that we are now suffering from. And it can’t be that that is what’s happening again. We can’t allow the entire sort of the market to be captured by the carbon emitters.”
But she emphasised that this is not to say that these countries don’t have good solutions. “I’m not saying that they don’t have a part to play — they have a major part to play — but there needs to be equity in how we are acknowledged, in how the solutions are rolled out and in who benefits from the opportunities that are presented.”
Unsung solutions
One of the innovations the accelerator is working with is Hello Tractor, which was developed in Kenya.
“It’s almost like the Uber for tractors,” said Moses. “Small farmers who don’t have the capacity to invest in their own tractor can then use an app to call a tractor and then using that tractor, be more efficient in their agricultural practices.”
When they don’t need it, it’s available to someone else.
“You have things like improving agricultural production, reducing waste and you have equipment that’s not just sitting idle. And that solution is now in Jamaica — it’s expanding between Africa and the Caribbean.”
Moses cites a Caribbean-born innovation, which involves turning sargassum (a large brown seaweed causing destruction in the Caribbean) waste into a solution that can create fertilisers.
“So, that’s something I’d like to be transported to anywhere in Africa that is dealing with sargassum as waste,” she said, adding that another innovation expanding throughout the Caribbean involves turning difficult-to-recycle plastic waste into a value added aggregate for use in the construction industry.
Climate finance ‘not a monolith’
“We’ve been talking about climate finance like it’s a monolith and it’s not,” she said. “It’s very different things to different people. And, so we have to be very specific about when we need equity, when we need loans, when we need blended finance, when we need grants, when we need impact investment and at what rate we require those things.
“Because what happens is you find a lot of the major players in the financial sphere, they’re saying ‘oh, there’s no end of money and there are no projects’ and we’re saying ‘oh, there are all of these projects but there’s no money’. That’s because we’re talking about different kinds of money.”
The way that climate finance is discussed needs to change. “We keep coming up against this situation where it’s like oil and water … And, in the developing world, we need mostly grant finance. We cannot continue to borrow away and indebt ourselves into additional problems that we didn’t cause.
“Somebody has burnt down our house and you’re saying ‘well, take a loan and well and build it back. I’m like, ‘wait a minute, you burnt down my house, maybe you should take a loan and build it back’.
“That’s the conversations we need to have versus this $100-billion, we’re not being fair about what kind of money,” she said, referring to the broken promise by wealthy countries to deliver $100-billion a year by 2020 to help poor countries adapt to climate change and mitigate further rises in temperature. “And it appears as though that money is going to be loan money and that’s not necessarily helpful.”
Moses pointed out, for example, that although renewable energy projects typically don’t have problems attracting funding, “it’s things like the mangrove rehabilitation, the building of a sea wall, building extra drainage for flood protection”, that do.
“Those are things that are either public goods or are difficult to fund because it’s very difficult to identify where the cash flow is coming from or there isn’t a cash flow, but it’s something that needs to be paid for. That’s something we’re really closely collaborating on with Egypt and the COP27 High Level Climate Champion, Dr Mahmoud Mohieldin.”
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