African firms start to take action on climate change
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.
Based at two plants in South Africa, the project will convert nitrous oxide and is aimed at cutting emissions equivalent to about 1 million tons of carbon dioxide a year.
One ton of nitrous oxide has the greenhouse gas impact of 310 tons of carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed for warming.
Some 90 percent of South Africa's electricity is produced from coal-fired plants. But carbon capture and storage (CCS) equipment will be mandatory for all new power stations.
No power plant yet operates anywhere in the world with CCS equipment attached, and only a handful of countries including the United States, Britain, Canada and Norway, have pledged public money to test the technology on a commercial scale.
But the picture in cosmopolitan Johannesburg or Nairobi -- where Kenya Airways plants thousands of seedlings on hills under it flight paths, or diners can eat in the leafy garden of Azalea, a carbon-free restaurant -- remains rare in Africa.
Many nations are focused on the challenges of developing basic energy infrastructure to eliminate the need to run costly generators. The emergence of firms offering conscience-salving carbon offsets seems a long way off.
Desire Kouadio N'Goran, an official at Ivory Coast's Environment Ministry, said his government was encouraging the use of solar energy and more efficient stoves, as well as public transport to cut vehicle emissions.
But Mohamed, the Barclays Kenya chief executive, said times were changing, and that African business had to plan long term.
He said his bank only lent to environmentally sustainable projects, but declined to give details.
"People are trading carbon units globally," he said. "There's no reason that can't cross over to emerging markets."
(Additional reporting by James Macharia in Johannesburg and Loucoumane Coulibaly in Abidjan; Writing by Daniel Wallis; Editing by Mary Gabriel)
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