Environmentalist

How one African nation is building the architecture to unlock billions in green investment and why getting it right matters for the whole continent. By Brian Onali Nduw The math is stark. Keeping global warming within manageable limits requires somewhere in the range of USD 900 billion in clean energy investment every single year through 2030. Developing nations alone need between USD 70 and USD 100 billion annually just to adapt to climate impacts they are already living with, rising seas, erratic rainfall, prolonged droughts, before even touching the question of reducing their own emissions. The money, at least in theory, exists. Global climate finance flows have grown substantially over the past decade. The problem is where it ends up. Sub-Saharan Africa, home to some of the world’s most climate-vulnerable populations, captures only around 3% of total global climate investment. Meanwhile, East Asia and the Pacific attract roughly a third of all flows, and Western Europe take...

By Brian Onali Nduw There is something profoundly humbling about standing before a room full of young people and telling them the truth about their planet. Not a softened, palatable version. The full truth. The kind that lives in peer-reviewed reports, that is argued over in Swiss conference rooms, and that eventually washes up, quite literally, on the shores of countries like Malawi, in the form of cyclones, droughts, and flooded roads. I am Kenyan. I came to Malawi to study, chasing knowledge across borders the way the climate crisis itself crosses them. Indifferent to where you were born or what your country emits. When the Head of the Department of Forestry and Environmental Management at Mzuzu University identified me as someone with grounding in climate finance topics and asked me to stand alongside Mr. Luke Mwakuluni, a Forest Extension Officer with the Co-operative Development Foundation of Canada, I felt both the honour and the gravity of what we were being asked to do....