Rwanda’s capital city Kigali will in September this year host the Climate Change Summit Africa 2020, a major annual international conference that discusses how the world should tackle climate change.
The three-days summit is set bring together non-state actors from across the African continent to discuss and exchange views on crucial environmental and climate issues, the organisers of the event confirmed Wednesday to APA in Kigali.
According to the Secretary General of the Rwanda Association of Local Government Authorities (RALGA), Ladislas Ngendahimana co-organiser of the event, there will also be representatives from local governments, businesses, trade unions, environmental NGOs, researches, among others.
“The discussion will highlight the engagement of African actors in fighting climate change,” Ngendahimana said.
It is expected that during the summit, different key actors in climate change space including agriculture and businesses will discuss working to reinforce mobilization of local government and non-state actors in the fight against climate change in Africa.
The previous Climate Change Summit held in Accra last year brought together 1,000 participants from 41 countries including 27 African countries to make specific recommendations on how to tackle the problem of climate change.
It is expected that various participating African countries will use the opportunity to come to a consensus on major climate change topics so that they can attend international conferences on climate change with a common position.
In Africa, the manifestations of climate change are expected to increase if nothing is done to change the greenhouse gas emissions curve, according to the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In southern and eastern Africa, drought affects all countries reducing the flow of large rivers used for power generation or irrigation, it said.
Climate Change also manifests itself in particular through desertification, of which the extension of the Sahara is the most significant fact. In less than 100 years, the surface area of this desert in North Africa has increased by 10%.
Official estimate show that that Hunger already affects about 240 million Africans daily.
By 2050, experts argue that even a change of about 1.2 to 1.9 degrees Celsius will have increased the number of the continent’s undernourished by 25% to 95% (central Africa +25%, East Africa +50%, Southern Africa +85% and West Africa +95%).
The situation will be dire for children who need proper nourishment to succeed in their education, it said
CU/abj/APA