African firms start to take action on climate change

By Daniel Wallis and Duncan Miriri

NAIROBI (Reuters) - With global warming expected to hit Africa hard, some companies in the "forgotten continent" are taking action themselves to fight climate change.

"The environment is not being taken very seriously in most of the emerging markets, because we haven't started feeling the pressure yet," Adan Mohamed, chief executive of Barclays Bank Kenya, told Reuters.

"But it has got to be addressed and it is up to us corporates to lead that."

Poverty in Africa, where nearly three quarters of people rely on agriculture, means it is the part of the world least able to adapt to the severe weather changes forecast to be triggered by global warming, experts say.

Tens of millions face water and food shortages, they say, as well as impacts ranging for disease to rising seas.

Kenyan firms including national flag carrier Kenya Airways, brewer East African Breweries and others are now actively studying ways to "green" their operations to help lessen the blow.

Even a popular Nairobi radio station, Capital FM, has got in on the trend, raising public awareness by paying $2,000 to an offsetting company to become a carbon free enterprise.

It all points to changing attitudes towards environmental protection in some of the world's poorest counties.

Last November the top U.N. climate official, Yvo de Boer, told Reuters Africa was the "forgotten continent" in the battle against warming and desperately needed help.

He said damage to the continent projected by the U.N. climate panel justified stronger world action -- even without considering likely disruptions to other parts of the planet.

Big developing countries like China, India and Brazil had won far more funds than Africa from rich nations to help cut greenhouse gases, he noted, for instance by investing in wind farms, hydropower dams or in cleaning up industrial emissions.

Just 2.4 percent of more than 1,100 projects for cutting greenhouse gases in developing nations are in Africa under the Clean Development Mechanism, a U.N.-backed scheme.

CHANGING ATTITUDES

South Africa, the continent's largest economy, does have a handful of such projects.

Sasol, the world's biggest maker of fuel from coal, is pioneering a plan to sell carbon credits by converting a greenhouse gas into nitrogen and oxygen, also earning it income.