Out-Law News 2 min. read
29 Apr 2015, 11:48 am
In the report, ‘Enhancing the Climate Resilience of Africa’s Infrastructure’ (192-page / 9.21 MB PDF), the bank said a “climate resilience project preparation facility” should be established to support plans for infrastructure investment, in addition to training programmes for planners and designers.
The bank’s senior regional adviser for Africa Jamal Saghir said inaction is “not an option”. “Climate change requires new approaches that will help make infrastructure investments in Africa more resilient to the uncertain climate of the future.”
The bank said the report, which was launched on 27 April during the Africa Climate Resilient Infrastructure Summit in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, “uses for the first time, a consistent approach across river basins and power systems in Africa, and wide range of state-of-the-art climate projections to evaluate the risks posed by climate change to planned investments in Africa’s water and power sectors”. The report analyses how investment plans “could be modified to minimise those risks... and quantifies the corresponding benefits and costs”.
“In the driest weather scenario, failure to integrate climate change in the planning and design of hydropower infrastructure could result in losses of revenues between 5% and 60% and consumer cost for energy could increase by three times as much as it is now,” the report said. Ignoring climate change could lead to planning and designing infrastructure that is “unsuitable for future climates”, the report said. However, there is also “a risk of adapting to climate change in the wrong way, which could be as significant to the damages when not adapting”.
The report said the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA), endorsed in 2012 by the continent’s heads of state and government, outlined a long-term plan for closing Africa’s infrastructure gap and enabling per capita income to rise above $10,000 in all the countries of the continent by 2040. PIDA recommended expanding roads by 37,000 kilometres, boosting hydroelectric generating capacity by more than 54,000 megawatts (MW), and increasing water storage capacity by 20,000 cubic kilometres.
The bank used a so-called ‘PIDA+’ “reference investment programme” to assess the impacts of climate change. “The window of opportunity for making investment more climate-resilient is considerable,” the report said. “The total estimated cost of implementing all the projects identified by PIDA to meet projected infrastructure needs by 2040 is $360 billion... By far, the largest demand for investment is for energy, accounting for $40.3bn or 60% of the PIDA priority action plan programme, followed by transport at $25.4bn (37%).”
“This massive programme of investment is, by and large, being designed on the basis of the region’s historical climate,” the report said. “But a vast body of scientific evidence indicates that the climate of the future will be very different from that of the past, although climate models often disagree on whether the future in any specific location will be drier or wetter.”
The report recommended an ‘adaptation strategy’, “suited for situation of deep uncertainty”, which can “cut in half, or more, the maximum climate change impact, such as loss of revenue or missed opportunity to increase it, that would be faced in the case of inaction”.
Figures released earlier this year by the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa (ICA) said total infrastructure funding commitments in Africa increased for the second year running in 2013, with the energy, transport, water and information and communications technology sectors the key beneficiaries.
Total external funding commitments of $52.9bn were made in 2013 by the private sector, non-ICA members including China, India, the Arab Co-ordination Group of funds and institutions and other European countries. The ICA said this “reinforced a trend of growing support for Africa’s infrastructure”, which recorded $34.3bn and $46.6bn total external funding in 2011 and 2012, respectively.
