Zambia Selected for New COP27 Investment Programme

Zambia has been selected among the first countries to participate in the new Nature, People and Climate (NPC) investment programme.

Through the programme, over 20,00 farmers will be trained in agricultural conservation whilst 30,000 hectares of wetlands are to be earmarked for preservation.

The programme, inaugurated at COP27, will attempt to aid Zambia and its regional allies’ attempts to preserve the Zambezi Basin. The five southern African countries – Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, and Tanzania – presented a joint vision to maintain the ecosystem that is crucial to food security, environmental stability, and economic development in the region.

Approximately 47 million people live in the Zambezi Basin. Those dependent on the Zambezi have found themselves increasingly facing drought, falling crop yields, and extreme flooding as the effects of climate change intensify. Most of the populations of these five southern African nations are dependent on rain-fed agriculture for subsistence. As such, maintaining the stability of the Zambezi basin is a crucial socio-economic priority, not just an environmental necessity.

At present, $350 million dollars have been pledged to the NPC to pilot and scale nature-based climate solutions in developing countries. Outside of southern Africa, the Dominican Republic, Egypt, Fiji and Kenya were also selected to pilot the NPC.

The responsibility of developed nations to pick up the tab on climate adjustment and conservation policies has long been a point of controversy at global climate summits. The Buenos Aires Plan of Action (2004) was the first time countries pledged to help those with more limited financial means adapt to climate change. The BRIC nations have long argued that the Global South’s development should not be sacrificed at the alter of euro-centric political and economic priorities. They argue that since western Europe and North America developed at a rapid pace through the use of fossil fuels, any commitments imposed by wealthy nations on poorer nations to mitigate a problem largely western in its inception would perpetuate global power inequalities unfairly.

However, since 2010 developing nations have become increasingly committed to climate pledges as the severity of the crisis became more acute and after wealthy nations made the COP17 commitment to the Green Climate Fund. The fund is designed to distribute $100 billion dollars a year to less developed countries. With developed countries facing increased pressure from activist groups, and developing countries most often feeling the greatest effects of the changing climate, the battle to keep warming below 1.5 degrees has become an increasingly global effort. Developing countries most often have infrastructure that is poorly designed to mitigate extreme weather events whilst the socio-economic insecurity of many of those countries’ inhabitants significantly increases the risks associated with climate change. As such, funds such as the NPC are seen as crucial in uniting the effort to preserve the planet’s core ecosystems.

Zambia’s Minister of Green Economy and Environment has expressed his pleasure at the news. “We have high ambitions as a country, and support from partners like CIF (the Climate Investment Fund) will be very important going forward. We look forward to quickly working together in mutually beneficial engagements,” noted Minsiter Nzovu. He emphasised that the government has “upscaled its resource mobilisation efforts” to address the challenges of climate change. Such measures include the signing of the UK Zambia Green Growth Compact Agreement to boost green growth investment in Zambia. Remarkably, 82% of Zambia’s electricity generation now comes from hydropower and the government have recently commissioned the Kafue Gorge Lower 750MW hydropower station to further boost this sector.