Enhancing the Climate Resilience of Africa’s Infrastructure

The technical meeting takes place at the UN Conference Centre in Addis Ababa and is organised by the African Union Commission (AUC), the African Climate Policy Center (ACPC) of the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), and the World Bank.

The Nordic Development Fund (NDF) participates in the technical meeting together with 45 representatives of regional African economic and political organisations, river basin authorities, national authorities, financing institutions, and researchers.  The technical meeting discusses both the findings and the next steps to be taken to better integrate climate resilience in infrastructure development.

The project has delivered a draft report that quantifies the impacts of climate change on African water and energy infrastructure. Moreover, it identifies and evaluates robust adaptation options, and formulates actionable recommendations for policy makers.

Africa has experienced economic growth of more than 5% per annum during the last decade, but to sustain this growth, investment in infrastructure is fundamental. In 2012, Africa’s heads of State and Government laid out an ambitious long-term plan for closing Africa’s infrastructure gap. Much of these investments will support the construction of long-lived infrastructure (e.g. hydropower dams, power stations, irrigation canals), which will be vulnerable to the potentially harsher climate of the future. Using for the first time a consistent approach across river basins and power systems in Africa, including a comprehensive, broad set of state-of-the-art climate projections, the report evaluates the risks posed by climate change to planned investments in Africa’s water and power sectors. It further analyses how investment plans could be modified to mitigate those risks; and it quantifies the corresponding benefits and costs. Finally, the report provides concrete recommendations for increasing the resilience of African infrastructure.

The report forms part of a larger project co-financed by NDF together with World Bank, UK Department for International Development (DfID); Kreditanstalt für Wiederaufbau (KfW); Agence Française de Développement (AFD); and the Government of the Netherlands. The project will release another report focusing on transport infrastructure later in 2015.