Africa\u2019s specific vulnerability to climate change is not accidental; it is the product of historical legacies and enduring structural inequalities. The African continent has contributed the least to global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, yet it is warming at almost twice the global average temperature rise.1 This pace of change, documented in the African Chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report, threatens the ecological, economic, and political foundations on which African societies depend.2 It is already reshaping Africa\u2019s biodiversity, water, and food systems. Economic projections underscore climate risks\u2019 severity. The African Development Bank (AfDB) and World Meteorological Organization indicate that Africa\u2019s per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) could fall sharply by 2030 if current high-emissions trajectories persist.3 <\/p>\n\n\n\n
These risks overlap pre-existing historical, political, and social vulnerabilities. Some of these stem from Africa\u2019s geophysical realities, but many are rooted in a history of extraction, debt entrapment, and externally imposed development agendas. Addressing these challenges demands urgent, balanced, and sustained mitigation and adaptation efforts that surpass technical fixes and that tackle climate vulnerability\u2019s underlying drivers. Despite these realities, adaptation is systematically neglected compared with mitigation in global climate governance, especially within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Negotiation outcomes disproportionately fund mitigation over adaptation, and intervention designs amplify this reality, as adaptation needs are too often subordinate to global emissions reduction targets. We conducted interviews and focus group sessions for this report (see Methodology) among African community actors, policymakers, and practitioners. This empirical evidence underscores structural asymmetries in adaptation that visibly obstruct and undermine forms of justice, including distributive, procedural, recognitional, and restorative. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Climate finance for adaptation remains limited, fragmented, and subject to conditionalities reflecting donors\u2019 interests more than recipients\u2019 needs. Technology transfer commitments are underdelivered and often burdened by intellectual property (IP) regimes that obstruct local adoption and ownership. Science and knowledge spaces reproduce knowledge hierarchies, with technical framings that privilege certain epistemologies while sidelining lived experience and IK systems. Meanwhile, measures of progress still primarily rely on throughput production reflected by GDP rather than indicators of human wellbeing and prosperity.4 The Paris Agreement, the progressive operationalisation of the Global Goal on Adaptation (GGA), and adaptation considerations in the Just Transition Work Programme (JTWP) in the UNFCCC negotiations are important steps toward correcting this neglect. However, significant gaps remain in translating commitments and decisions into equitable and context-specific actions.5<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Beyond the UNFCCC, adaptation is gaining traction and political prominence in multilateral fora, such as the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), through their focus on land and ecosystem resilience, and the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development (FFD4).6 The Second Africa Climate Summit also placed greater emphasis on adaptation and its financing as a political priority, both in terms of needs and the solutions Africa can offer. In this report, we position JTfA as a necessary course correction for the inequities that have shaped adaptation action in Africa. We seek to expand the evidence base, strengthen African thought leadership, and provide a roadmap through which adaptation can be conceived, planned, financed, and implemented, in ways that advance resilience and justice. This report therefore moves the debate beyond technical adequacy toward more foundational questions of: What kind of adaptation future does Africa need, who defines it, who benefits, and who gets to decide? This report is geared toward relevant African and global policy and decision-making institutions at all levels, and to academia and wider civil society organisations. We hope for broader public engagement with the report.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Africa\u2019s specific vulnerability to climate change is not accidental; it is the product of historical legacies and enduring structural inequalities. The African continent has contributed the least to global greenhouse […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":46,"featured_media":0,"parent":8825,"menu_order":2,"template":"","pub_page":[37],"pub_topic":[],"pub_type":[],"class_list":["post-8829","publication","type-publication","status-publish","hentry","pub_page-chapter"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/powershiftafrica.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication\/8829","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/powershiftafrica.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/powershiftafrica.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/publication"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powershiftafrica.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/46"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/powershiftafrica.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication\/8829\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8831,"href":"https:\/\/powershiftafrica.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication\/8829\/revisions\/8831"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powershiftafrica.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/publication\/8825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/powershiftafrica.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8829"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"pub_page","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powershiftafrica.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pub_page?post=8829"},{"taxonomy":"pub_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powershiftafrica.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pub_topic?post=8829"},{"taxonomy":"pub_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/powershiftafrica.org\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pub_type?post=8829"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}