The second Africa Climate Summit (ACS2) was held in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa 8-10 September 2025. The definitive feature of ACS211 was its size. Building on the momentum of the first summit in Nairobi in 2023, twenty four thousand people attended ACS2 which ran 10-15 sessions in parallel as well as a busy pavilion showcasing the work countries, foundations and companies, throughout the three days.
What has driven climate change up the African agenda in recent years? What has spawned the proliferation of NGOs working on climate change in Africa? And what attracted so many people to Addis Ababa in mid-September? Not that long ago, after all, most African leaders seemed to think climate change was neither of their making nor their problem. African negotiators at the annual Bonn gathering22 defaulted to ‘common but differentiated responsibilities’ to insist on their right to continue fossil fuel exploration, extraction and burning. Blinded by their outrage about broken climate finance promises, most African leaders seemed uninterested in alternative climate resilient development pathways.
So it was interesting to perceive a change in tone and strategy at ACS2, as if some sober realities have finally dropped on key issues (with a lot of help from the current US administration in 2025): current fossil fuel based development will confront a dead-end which foregrounds the need for ‘just transitions’; high-income countries care (and have always cared!) more about their own interests than Africa’s (the scrambling for access to Africa’s oil and gas reserves in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, is just the latest iteration of the historically duplicitous international support for climate change in Africa); attracting foreign direct investment is more likely when this investment is guided by domestic budget allocations; climate change impacts occur regardless of whether global politicians ‘believe’ in climate change or not. Of course, continued offering-up of Africa’s fossil fuel resources to the hydrocarbon multi-nationals still appeals to certain leaders (and their political parties) that are addicted to resource taxes, but at ACS2 there were African leaders talking up the alternatives. At the closing event, Ethiopian President Taye Atske Selassie, suggested the summit had repositioned Africa as “a global centre for climate solutions….not a victim.”
For the record, African countries are at the receiving end of disproportionate climate change impacts. Climate change is already amplifying and exposing Africa’s prevailing institutional weaknesses and poverty, costing between 5 – 15% of GDP according to some claims presented at ACS2. Africa is also the only region in the world where deaths per 100,000 attributed to environmental disasters have increased in recent years. But not before time some African leaders are recognising that being the victim of an unjust global order does not, on its own, comprise a viable economic development strategy; all the less so in context of increasingly transactional geo-economics.
As of 2025, all 54 African countries have signed the Paris Agreement, Libya being the last to sign (Western Sahara and Somaliland are not recognised by the United Nations and therefore not able to sign). Mapping the climate change motives of respective African countries is not easy, but prominent among the shared motivations is the hope for investment and finance. The focus has shifted beyond the Green Climate Fund (which has delivered miniscule amounts of money to Africa) and the Loss and Damage Fund (which is yet to disburse money) to a broader array of investment and financing mechanisms. A number of sessions at ACS2 drew attention to the global significance of Africa’s natural assets, including the largest terrestrial carbon sink in the Congo Basin. There were multiple discussions on how to close the $191 billion annual investment gap for land restoration. A sub-theme in the financing sessions looked at how African countries might mobilise domestic resources before expecting international markets to come to their rescue. Mark Napier of FSD Africa pointed out that reforming domestic markets could be quicker and easier than the necessary task of “reforming the global financial architecture”. Kate Hampton, CEO of the Children’s Investment Fund Foundation (CIFF) was more forthright in her analysis, “The international financial system does not work for people or planet…Financialisation in its current format accelerates the problems. Efficiency, as an ends in itself, drives money away from the people and causes who need it most.” Hampton went on to encourage African countries not to succumb to the voluntary carbon market that would see most value accrue to foreigners and instead proactively advance Article 6 rulebooks and the related carbon market opportunities. Kenyan President, William Ruto, one of the African leaders that has built a ‘proactive African climate champion’ profile to both distract attention from domestic political challenges and connect with international networks was clear on the investment imperative, “We made commitments (at the Glasgow COP), we kept our part of the bargain, we expect our partners to keep their commitments”. But he also recognises that the required investment is more likely to be enticed by Kenya’s domestic policies than moral suasion. Ruto is tightly associated with the Nairobi Declaration that emerged from ACS1, and has driven aggressive renewable energy roll-outs and a proactive Kenyan carbon market position. He has used these efforts to ensure the Global Centre on Adaptation, an outfit that claims to have had a hand in marshalling $18.3 billion in investments, is headquartered in Nairobi.
It is necessary, midst the pledges and rhetoric from panel discussions at events such as ACS2, to look for actual projects and examples. Africa’s M300 programme, connecting 300 million people to electricity services at a cost of $300 million was celebrated for entering implementation. M300 is an offshoot of the Africa Single Electricity Market initiative and the AU-NEPAD African Continental Power Systems Masterplan and for once the master plans have led to action. M300 “works with the willing” in terms of a number of principles, including a commitment to least costs electricity once the costs of transmissions lines and last mile connections have been included; inter-connected grids; private sector involvement; people paying what they can afford; blending finance to allow for cross-subsidisation and utility reform.
I attended ACS2 representing the Urban2063 coalition and looking for links to the Urban20 Mayors Summit happening later in the week in Johannesburg, South Africa. Ethiopian Prime Minister, Abiy Ahmed Ali, understands the links between urbanisation and climate change. Ethiopia’s federal government has been quick to put up its hand to host pan-African events; ACS2 followed on the hosting of the Africa Urban Forum in 2024 and Abiy Ahmed has hosted global network events to showcase Addis Ababa’s new urban infrastructure and eye-catching “urban corridors” to the world. In explaining Ethiopia’s import ban on combustion engine cars, Abiy Ahmed told the opening plenary that this was as much about urban air quality as it was about greenhouse gas mitigation. A nuanced and clever narrative that he matched with the political choreography of combining, to the day, ACS2 with the opening of the Grand Renaissance Dam and Hydropower Plant that has been 14 years in the construction.
Based on the sessions I attended the importance of the continent’s urbanisation mega-trend and evolving cities remains under-acknowledged. There are still major disconnects between the strategies guiding industrialization, urbanisation and climate change in almost all African countries, and this represents a missed opportunity allowing too many African cities to continue as landing pads for extractive interests rather than hubs of diverse, climate resilient activity. The much-referenced mobilisation of domestic finance in support of climate resilient development is only possible if revenue is actually collected in cities and reinvested in climate resilient infrastructure (including building materials), services and mobility. Similarly, it is difficult to see how national economies will diversify away from fossil fuel commodities unless they harness the existing diversity in urban economies, or how the continent’s strategic minerals will support green domestic value chains, unless these value chains find off-takers in rapidly expanding cities.
Some of this is political. African leaders know the dangers of devolving fiscal and regulatory power to cities where opposition is often incubating. But as the Urban2063 Special Report points out, urbanisation on the continent is “an unstoppable force” and unless it is harnessed opportunities will be hemorrhaged, and political strategies will be found wanting. One experience at ACS2 stuck in my mind as the near perfect exemplar of this. Despite requiring prior registration for ACS2, the 24,000 delegates found themselves queuing for four hours in the African sun to receive accreditation on the first morning, all the while being harassed by the local military. It was a ‘bad look’ from a bygone era and the conversation in my bit of the queue was about how a handful of Addis Ababa’s’ tech savvy youth could have avoided the lengthy delay if they have been given a couple of hours to think of a smarter accreditation process. The platforms on which national governments can trust young, economically ambitious people to solve wicked urban and climate problems through their ingenuity and connectivity was in short supply at ACS2; an oversight that misses the central opportunity being generated by Africa’s urbanisation. ACS2 broke the shackles of Africa’s climate victim status and began exploring alternative development pathways. But there is still some way to go before national climate change responses harness the inspiration and energy of the continent’s young artists, tech-innovators and circular economy enterprises that were profiled at the Urban20 Summit, to becomes something that infuses every livelihood pursuit of the continents growing urban population.
