African cities call for local climate action, adaptation finance

By Kapil Subramanian

In recent years, there has been much focus on the climate actions of cities, provinces and other sub-national entities. It is due to the realisation that national actions will, alone, not be sufficient — neither for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (or even 2°C) by the end of the century nor for adequate adaptation.

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The [Covenant of Mayors in Sub-Saharan Africa] encourages local authorities to make a political commitment that contributes to its three pillars, namely access to energy, climate mitigation and climate adaptation.

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Further, the Ghanaian Minister for local government Hajia Alima Mahama pointed to the imbalance between mitigation and adaptation finance, stating that the international community had committed to $600 billion for the former and only $200 billion for the latter.

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It further emphasized the importance of a bottom up approach to the revision of nationally determined contributions (NDCs) through the formulation of locally determined contributions (LDCSs) to feed into the NDCs.

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