According to a report by the news agency AFP, the African continent is not getting enough of the billions of dollars in climate change funding - despite being the region that suffers most.
Those were the words of Akinwumi Adesina, the head of the African Development Bank (AfDB), who felt that the world needed to rethink how it spent the US$100 billion a year in pledges anticipated to be available by 2020 to fight global warming.
And, Adesina added, Africa was already not getting its fair share of climate funds, which a recent study calculated as being around $62bn last year from governments, multilateral institutions and the private sector.
This despite the fact that, while Africa currently only generates 2% of all greenhouse gas emissions, it is the area that suffers most from the impact of climate change.
The problem, according to Adesina, is that the climate change fund is allocated to projects that are either being used for mitigation (cutting carbon emissions) or adaptation (preparing for extreme weather events and natural disasters caused by rising global temperatures). And Africa is not getting enough.
“What Africa needs is funds for adapting,” said Adesina. “We have hundreds of millions of people who have no way of adapting to climate change.”
