Changing the narrative on Africa.
Airline offset demand is turning carbon credits into a high-value compliance asset across the continent. With governments tightening regulations, early movers include the DRC, Malawi, Tanzania, and Kenya, with Africa increasingly seen as a reliable supplier for global aviation offsets.
From South Africa’s industrial incentives to Kenya’s green number plates, a number of African governments are moving beyond pilot projects to implement comprehensive electric vehicle policies.
A patchwork of REDD+ projects across the Congo Basin generates credits that fund ranger salaries and school repairs, offering a glimpse of carbon finance’s potential. This is coming to bear in a voluntary market reeling from global scandals that have exposes flaws in offset integrity and over-crediting accusations. Unmet promises have given rise to tensions among stakeholders and communities over verification and value. Demands for stricter safeguards in the carbon credit market are growing louder.
A determined African bloc mounted a formidable challenge at the latest round of global climate negotiations at COP30, refusing to adopt a framework it views as an unfair shifting of financial burdens and political responsibility onto the low and middle income countries. The confrontation centrered on a technical but politically charged set of measurements known as the global goal on adaptation (GGA) indicator list. For African nations and their allies, the list is not a mere statistical exercise but a mechanism that could lock in inequity for decades.
African governments are moving faster than most of the world to put soil health at the centre of climate action, according to a new analysis that highlights a major blind spot in global climate planning. A review of Nationally Determined Contributions by the Save Soil campaign shows that 70% of countries still do not treat soil or agriculture as meaningful mitigation tools — even though soils are the planet’s largest terrestrial carbon sink. The report came on the back of COP30 in Belém, Brazil where campaigners hoped soil-carbon targets will finally be recognised.
Hilary Savi has been shuttling from one meeting room to the next at COP30 in Belém, Brazil, her notebook filling quickly with ideas gleaned from panels on gender, education, youth, and climate adaptation.
In a warehouse in Cape Town’s Montague Gardens, racks of inverters and lithium batteries hum, ready for the next fleet of installers. Joule Energy Solutions, founded in 2020, has turned this space into the nerve centre of a nationwide distribution network, supplying hundreds of solar installers from Johannesburg to Durban, Bloemfontein, and Gqeberha.
“What’s unfolding between Saldanha and Rotterdam could reshape Africa’s place in global trade,” according to Dr. Thandi Karl, a maritime economist at the Africa Centre for Strategic Studies. “It’s not just about cleaner fuels, it’s about positioning African industry in a low-carbon future.”
Across Africa, smallholder farmers are financing their own fight against climate change, spending billions each year to keep food systems alive as global support lags. A new analysis shows they already shoulder most of the world’s adaptation costs, even as they receive less than 1% of the funding meant to help them.
Pretoria’s R2.23 trillion (approx. $128 billion USD) Integrated Resource Plan 2025 sets out to halve the country’s reliance on coal and add more than 100 gigawatts of new clean power, which is more than double of its current clean energy capacity, by 2039. The blueprint marks one of the country’s most ambitious energy overhauls in decades and would yield jobs and boost its energy sovereignty.