DRAFT CONCEPT NOTE AND PROVISIONAL AGENDA

MEETING OF

THE COMMITTEE OF AFRICAN HEADS OF STATE AND GOVERNMENT ON CLIMATE CHANGE (CAHOSCC)

Date: 15 February 2025

Time: 16h30-18h30

Venue: AU Headquarters, Addis Ababa

Background and Context

Africa is at a critical juncture, grappling with severe consequences stemming from climate change that disproportionately affects its communities and ecosystems. The continent faces a multitude of climate-related challenges, leading to profound humanitarian crises that threaten agriculture, food security, education, energy, infrastructure, peace and security, public health, and water resources. These issues not only jeopardize the well-being of millions but also stifle socio-economic development across the region.

Over the past sixty years, Africa has experienced a worrying trend of rising temperatures that outpace the global average. In 2023, the continent endured extreme heatwaves, heavy rainfall, destructive floods, tropical cyclones, and persistent droughts. These alarming events underscore the urgent need for concerted global action and support to mitigate these impacts and foster resilience, ensuring a sustainable future for Africa and its people. This pattern of extreme weather events continued in 2024. Parts of southern and Northern Africa have been gripped by damaging drought. The above-normal seasonal rainfall has caused death and devastation in East, West, and Central African countries. This exacerbates an already desperate humanitarian crisis. Without clear, concrete interventions to alleviate these impacts, communities in the continent will continue to suffer on all fronts.

It is estimated that, on average, African nations are losing 2 to 5 percent of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to climate change impacts, while many are reallocating as much as 9 percent of their budgets to address the challenges posed by climate extremes.

The recent pledge at the UNFCCC - COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, of USD300billion to be mobilized by the developed countries for the developing countries (Africa inclusive) by 2035 in the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG) on finance falls far short of the USD1.3 trillion requested by the developing countries to undertake their climate actions by 2030. This COP29 outcome has dire consequences for a continent that contributed the least (less than 4 percent to the global greenhouse gas emissions) to the cause of climate change and has the least capacity to adapt without significant international financial support.

By 2030, it is estimated that up to 118 million, extremely poor people (living on less than US$ 1.90 per day) will be exposed to drought, floods, and extreme heat in Africa if adequate response measures (including new, predictable, and accessible climate finance and other means of implementation) are not provided. This will place additional burdens on poverty alleviation efforts and significantly hamper growth, according to the State of the Climate in Africa 2023 report.

The Committee of African Heads of State and Government (CAHOSCC), which holds annual meetings to evaluate the continent’s interventions to climate action, was established in 2009 by the AU Assembly of Heads of State and Government to spearhead African Common Position on Climate Change and to ensure that Africa speaks with one voice in global climate change negotiations. The CAHOSCC coordinates climate-related decisions and programs, including those related to migration and security, and champions critical issues to the continent, such as; access to climate action implementation support, Africa's right to define its own development pathways, and Global carbon neutrality by 2050.