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Civil Society Call: Energy for All 2030
(Bonn, 10.10.2011) Civil society organisations from Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa have sent in Octobre 2011 a call to EU leaders to commit to eradicating energy poverty and achieving universal energy access by 2030. The call focuses particularly on Sub-Saharan Africa, as the region most acutely affected. The call asks the EU to deliver the quantity and quality of EU funding to make this a reality.
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World Bank Group and International Energy Development
(Bonn/Stuttgart, 25.02.2011) Church Development Service and Bread for the World, two development agencies of the protestant churches in Germany, commissioned a study in order to get a comprehensive and critical overview about the energy lending policies and portfolio of the World Bank Group and its implication for sustainable development, poverty reduction and climate change. The study was accomplished by Heike Mainhardt-Gibbs, USA, an expert on World Bank Group strategies and policies. The study was published in 2011 and contains 60 pages plus several annexes.
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Timid hope at end of climate negotiations in Cancun
(Cancún, 13.12.10) The Cancun Agreement, adopted by the vast majority of parties at the United Nations climate change conference (COP16) in the early morning hours of 11 December, gives guarded hope to churches and civil society groups who had called for decisive action by the world's governments. In an improvement on the process that led to the much-criticized Copenhagen Accord last year, the president of the conference managed to keep the climate negotiations in the multilateral track and make some, although insufficient, steps forward.
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Faith communities stress moral dimension of climate change
(Cancún, 09.12.10) Faith communities came together to address climate change, poverty and sustainable development in a side event jointly organized by Caritas Internationalis, ACT Alliance and the World Council of Churches (WCC) at the Cancun climate summit on 7 December.
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Issuance of Toxic Carbon Credits Undermines Credibility of UNFCCC Process
(Cancún, 08.12.2010) An open letter sent by a broad coalition of green groups including CDM Watch, Greenpeace and WWF to the COP Presidency calls to rescind millions of fake HFC-23 CDM credits. Environmentalists claim that the issuance of those credits has put a black mark on the environmental integrity of the CDM and prompted speculation that the UNFCCC process has been hijacked by special interests.
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Further notices

Unavoidable climate change will cost Africa at least $26 billion a year


(Nairobi, 27.11.2009) If warming is allowed to reach the higher 2°C limit that European countries have indicated they are prepared to accept, then the costs to Africa would double, warns the study "The Economic Cost of Climate Change in Africa" of the Pan-African Alliance for Climate Justice.

Unavoidable climate change will cost Africa at least 1.7 per cent of its GDP by 2040 - USD 26.35 billion a year at current rates - and leave millions more people suffering from hunger, diseases, floods and water shortages. The figure is an estimate of the damage that would be caused even if dramatic international action held the global temperature rise at 1.5°C, as demanded by the poorest countries, says the report, The Economic Cost of Climate Change in Africa.

This is the first time that the unavoidable cost of climate change to Africa has been calculated – other studies have examined the costs that would be imposed by temperature increases of more than 1.5 °C. The global average temperature has already risen by 0.8 °C and a further rise of 0.7 °C is inevitable. Even this relatively low level of unavoidable warming will leave an additional 12 million people hungry in Africa, damage crop yields, increase the numbers suffering Malaria and diarrhoea by up to 16 per cent and cause the number of people killed in floods to more than double, according to the study.

If warming is allowed to reach the higher 2 °C limit that European countries have indicated they are prepared to accept, then the costs to Africa would double, warns the report. The report is written by Christian Aid partner the Pan-African Alliance for Climate Justice. Without urgent action to limit climate change, the costs are likely to be significantly worse. Some scientists are now suggesting that the world is likely to face warming of more than 4 °C by 2100 or sooner.

The Economic Cost of Climate Change in Africa, says that a rise of 4 OC would be likely to cost Africa at least $155bn (at current levels) - 10 per cent of its GDP. It would increase the number of people at risk of hunger by 55 million and leave up to 600 million more people than at present affected by water shortages. The report’s statements about the possible future costs of climate change in Africa are based computer modelling which combines the economic and scientific aspects of climate change in a single analytical framework. This means that it takes account of how climatic changes affect social and economic processes. The report suggests that by 2030, Africa will need a minimum of $10 billion a year to help its people try to cope with the effects of climate change, and possibly several times this amount.

Together with faith-based development agencies in a number of other European countries, Christian Aid has launched a new climate justice campaign called Countdown to Copenhagen. www.christianaid.org.uk/copenhagen
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