Browsing: Can wealthy countries finance Africa’s energy transition?

• The 2009 Copenhagen Accord was not a binding promise but set up a durable framework for future talks.
• One of these solutions is for African countries to use crude oil, natural gas, and other hydrocarbons to develop their resources and use the revenues to finance energy transition.
• In the process, they should also seek to meet several other complementary goals, such as building gas-fired plants that can provide cleaner power than existing coal.

From an African perspective, one of the most important things to come out of COP15, the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, was the formal recognition of the fact that lower-income countries were not in a position to bear as much of the cost of the energy transition as their higher-income counterparts.

That recognition was spelt out in the section of the Copenhagen Accord that included a pledge from the world’s highly developed states to …