 OK, haydiw? We're ready On we're ready thumbs up Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen Welcome to the second issue briefing the World Economic Forum on Africa 2016 My name is Oliver Kan I work in Media team here at the forum Now, the whole purpose of the issue briefings is a format we have developed to hopefully tackle some of the tougher issues Some issues perhaps that have been left off the major programmatic sessions tougher issues and we have a short amount of time to cover them. which means we encourage blunt talking a gwahanol ffaisiwyr, eu bod wedi'i gweithio i'r rhan o gwahanol yma, a'i gweithio i'r rhan o'r panel yn y gwaith. Yn ymgyrchau yng nghymru, ac mae'n cael gweithio, ond yn ymgyrchwr. A yna yn gwneud o'r ystafell y mae'n gweithio sy'n amlwg ymgyrchol i ddigital o ddifithl ei gwaith. A wedyn yn ddiddordeb, Too much on digitial transformation, we are focusing too much on productivity rises. Are we not looking at the elephant in the room, are we sleep walking into bigger problems ahead? Now, to join me on this session, I'm glian freez apart to be joined by Sandy Anderman, Chief Scientast, Senior Vice President, Conservation International and a real pioneer in data-driven measurements of climate change I hope we'll have a good illustration of the outlook both today and going forward from Sandy. deer vice presence for Africa, yw ysgol yw'r Bankaidd, ysgol yw Washington DC. Yn gweithio, mae'n gwneud yw'r gweithio economig i'r ysgol iawn i'r ysgol yn y celfwyr sy'n cyflwyngau ar gyfer. Mae'n credu i'r ysgol sy'n gwneud i'r ysgol i'r cyffredinol i'r cyflwyngau i'r cyflwyngau i'r ysgol iawn i'r ysgol iawn i'r ysgol iawn. Yn ymlaen i'r Llyfrinol Llyfrinol, yw Mamadu Bithie, ynghylch gwaith yma yng Nghymru, a'r Ffgwladu Afroffisi i'r Gwyrdd Rhwng yn gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio, y gallwn gwneud yn y rhan o'r gweithio'r cyffredinol ac mae'n gweithio'n gwneud o'r gwaith gyda'r gyffredinol o'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio'r gweithio. Sandy, yna yma, yma, mae yna, a bryd o'i chweithio'n gweithio'r gweithio? Well, in Africa, climate change is really the new normal, and the statistics are very scary. So here in Rwanda, on average, temperature has already increased 0.75 degrees per decade over the last 30 years. In Tanzania, wet season rainfall in key maize growing areas has decreased 40% over the last 30 years. In Ethiopia, pastoralist rangelands, seasonal rainfall has decreased as much as 56%. The solution, a key part of the solution to this, has to be delivering the right data at the right scales at the right time. And much development is still based on untested assumptions and honestly wishful thinking. So in Tanzania, where maize production has declined and rainfall has declined, we can show that access to extension information, good information, can increase maize yield 40% in drought years independent of soil type. And in flood years, wetter than average years, just good information alone can increase yield 25%. And yet most farmers still don't have access to extension information. In Ethiopia, we're really talking about transforming pastoral livelihoods. But how do you transform pastoral livelihoods when two-thirds of women have no access to internet, TV or radio or newspaper? So delivering information at the right scales has got to be a priority. Thank you, Sandy. Mactar, what work have you been doing at the World Bank around this important issue? Climate change for us is central to our strategy in Africa. And what we try to do, particularly, is to make adaptation central to this conversation. When we were going towards COP 21, there were a lot of discussion on mitigation but very little discussion on adaptation. And it was very important to make sure that agenda is forgotten. We developed an action plan, a business plan, which shows the overall cost was around $19 billion, which was helping countries to adapt to climate change, to temperature rise, to sea level rise, to frequent extreme events like at Union. And what we will be doing is to work with the country around some initiatives such as smart agriculture to make sure that we use the technology available to our smart agriculture to work around the main sources of water in Africa, in West Africa, which are the Niger River and the Lake Chad, which is under use right. And for us it's essential to really stop the progress that have been made by having investment around those natural resources that are available in Africa. The second one is about the blue economy. We don't talk a lot about it but coastal erosion is becoming a serious problem in Africa. For historical reason, most of the capital city and most of the economic activity in Africa is on the coast. And we are seeing a very fast erosion. My own country, for instance, Senegal recently, the tourism sector was affected by the erosion that we saw on beaches. We didn't allow any more people to come and do some tourism. The World Bank has to help and support countries to do that. The third element is on everything which is on adaptation to floods and prevention of floods. So we've been working with the country around the Zambezi River where you have a cycle of drought and floods which affect regularly countries like Mozambique, countries like Zambia and so forth to create some early warning systems which allow countries to be ready. But also to insist that infrastructure are built to be resilient to these external shocks. So this is the kind of things that we've been doing on climate change lately. All these 19 billion, half of it, the 5.6 will be financed through either resources and we are trying to mobilize resources from other partners or donors to be able to finance the rest of the business plan which is not. So this business plan was developed by countries based on the national NCD programme and this was really on-grown programmes. It's not something that we came and said to the countries as your priorities. It was based on the national programme that's developed that we tried to consolidate in one business plan and cost it so that we can mobilize resources from the international community. Max, I'm wondering how loudly your message is getting heard. You're asking for a lot of money, about another 75, 66% from partners. You're putting up a better money yourself, of course, but faced with so many investment priorities is that our leaders around this region are reacting. Do they see the scale of the challenge and are they rising to it? We see some interest. Actually, I think that we can have a win-win solution when you look at a productivity and let me take the case of solar energy. Today, because of technology progress, we can have the kilowatt of electricity generated by solar runs, 6 cents kilowatt, which is not something that was possible 20 years ago. We're talking about 22 to 19 cents. Today, we can have, even in a country with a small-scale solar, around 10 to 12 cents kilowatt, which is much lower than most of the country's production of solar. So, it's a possibility today to leapfrog. Just think about it. A country, a long-long country like Chad, like Niger, will have never dreamed to be able to have access to electricity. We'll be able to have electricity, clean electricity in the country and therefore increase productivity while protecting the environment. So, we have a win-win and I think that moving forward, my suggestion is to try to show the win-win solutions that we can have to make sure that people don't see productivity growth and protected environment as being orthogonal. But there are some things that we can do together on that. Some points like smart agriculture, like solar energy, like coastal erosion where we can have this coalition. And lastly, tell more of the good stories that are coming from Africa. When we talk about the protection of the forest and the biodiversity, we think about Costa Rica. We don't talk about Gabon. Gabon has done the same. Gabon has been protected, the forest and nobody talk about it. We talk about Costa Rica. So, tell us a good story when it's happening in Africa. It's also part of mobilising people around this. And lastly, makes a financing mechanism that exists much more accessible, much easier to mobilise. The green fund and other type of instruments should be much easier and much more agile so that we can tap that money and mobilise it because there is commitment of the international community to finance it. Commitment from the international community. It's encouraging to hear. Maybe we'll talk about business a little bit later. Okay, so we've gone from an information deficit to an investment deficit. Mamadou Bitei from Rockefeller. You're a frontier investor. We just talked about that. What are you seeing on the ground when you talk to business leaders and political leaders? Well, let me first say that for the Rockefeller Foundation we really recognise the role that climate change plays in depleting development efforts. And we have then chosen to make resilience as one of our key focus areas. Building resilience to climate change and to other vulnerabilities and the ability to bounce back stronger and be stronger is one of our dual goals together with building inclusive economies. We see also as a philanthropic organisation that our role can be really to put our risk philanthropic dollars into really pioneering solutions that can be taken and scaled and applied to specific situations. Some of these are solutions that can be applied globally. Some of these are also very specific to specific areas. And some of these examples where we have really invested recently are some of these are like Rebuild by Design, which is a programme that has been conceived after the Superstorm Sandy hit the United States, where we created a unique competition that raised awareness and inspired public participation to transform the way disaster recovery efforts are designed, funded and implemented across the United States. So this was a challenge from 148 international applicants, 10 interdisciplinary teams were selected. And with the Foundation's $3 million investment to design this and come up with the solution, we're able to leverage nearly a billion dollars from federal recovery funds to address that. Other examples are 100 resilient cities because also cities just as Mr Job just said in fragile ecosystems and along coast the impact of climate change can be very catastrophic. Coastal flooding could produce damages costing over $1 trillion a year by 2050. So this is why also we launched 100 resilient cities, which is a platform by which 100 cities are selected globally to really be in a platform to have a paradigm shift how we look at city development. Not just in a traditional way, but really looking at it from a resilience building perspective. And 67 cities have so far been selected and instituting one of the benefits is really how we are raising awareness of the needs of building resilience, how a city needs to have for instance a chief resilience officer like it would have a chief of police or another official to be ingrained and institutionalized. For Africa in general also, we have climate smart rural development, rural development that we've launched, which was mainly designed to help countries, research governments and others build their capacity to addressing the vulnerabilities to climate change. This has generated innovations in the field, such as the African risk capacity today, which is a pooled risk agency, specialized agency of the African Union. Today, which using a software Africa risk review can use data, weather related data to provide insurance to countries and thereby not only give them access when a disaster comes to access the resources for immediate response, but also, more importantly, take them through a journey during which actually they develop contingency plans, which also will help them once resources come, not just relying on international community, but be having the ability to respond through that. Finally, I want to also talk about the Global Resilience Partnership, which is also bringing together the Rockefeller Foundation, USAID and the Swedish International Development Agency with an investment of $50 million each actually to design and surface solutions in Africa, the Sahel in the Horn of East Africa, in the Southeast Asia, local solutions to address the biggest challenges and threats vulnerabilities to climate change. So, if you wish, we see our role also of building data. We are very proud actually to have supported the development of the Atlas, which will provide data that can be accessible to the world community, analyze, to design a very specific, very precise intervention that will help address this issue. So, this is what we see. So, our role is pioneering, but our expectation is that also platforms like this can help form those partnerships that takes these working solutions and scaling them so that they can help the global community address these issues. I can see it anyway as a comment, but at this point, if I may, I'll pause first to see who wants to ask a question. Let's see a brief show of hands. The gentleman over there, anyone else for now? We'll try to take a couple if we can. Okay, gentlemen, sir, let's start with you. Hi there, I'm John Duncan from Old Mutual Investment Group. I'm kind of curious here from the panel. I mean, aren't we kidding ourselves on some level? I mean, when you look at sort of global carbon projections in the emerging market economy, actually what we're talking about is an increase in absolute terms in carbon emissions over the next 30 years. I just worry that we talk about climate change, but actually we're not really addressing the real reality that a lot of African countries are going to be consistently putting capital into basically fossil fuel reserves over the next while. It's a good point. We've seen development paths in Asia which have been improved unsustainable in Africa. It has a golden opportunity to get development rights and conserve as well as grow, but is it actually going to happen? Are we sleepwalking? Are we still focusing on old traditional models of growth which are going to be potentially disastrous? I would like to address this point particularly. I mean, this is exactly what we can do and we have to do and which is starting to happen. When I took this job four years ago, some people were saying that you cannot build a dam which is the highest in 10 meters in Africa. That's what was told. I would say it's strange because half of the world has built dams in Europe, Asia, America and I don't understand why Africa cannot build dams. If you want to provide electricity which as you said allows women to access basic services, we need to have electricity which is cheap and the cheapest one is hydro and Africa has a ton of hydro. So today we have big investment in hydro, Swapiti, Keleta, Lamponga in Cameroon and we don't know what will happen to Inga but if Inga happens it can provide a lot of energy to basically a large part of Africa. So I don't think that Africa, actually what I've been saying repeatedly is that Africa can have its energy revolution being a green revolution. We have the potential. The potential that we have today in geothermal, in wind energy, in solar energy, in hydro, there is no reason you can have a very kind of diverse energy matrix in Africa which is totally green. So it's just a matter of getting all the instruments of mobilizing all the resources of the private sector to do that. And it's happening. People in the private sector are investing in IPPs, in solar, in IPPs, in geothermal, in IPPs, in hydro. So it's just a matter of mobilizing. What I think that the money could come from and the coalition like that can help build. We have pension fund and insurance fund which are sitting on huge amount of money and why they're investing it in places where they have returned which are pretty low. So if we manage to find a mechanism to de-risk some of this investment, there is a proposition here to mobilize these very long assets, long resources to invest it in green energy and be able to do two things. Help the retirees in Europe and Europe in the country to get better return in the pension fund. At the same time, do excellent things which provide green electricity to the poorest in the world. So I'm not taking it as a fatality. We can change it. And it's happening just a matter of turning that coalition and make it much more resilient to shocks. Please put your hands up if you have any questions otherwise I'm just going to go straight ahead. Sandy, do you share this optimism, the businesses that you talk to in talking the same language when they come to prepare for green growth or do you think that's slightly naive at the moment? I do share the optimism and one of the reasons, so as Mamadou said he invested and basically the Rockefeller Foundation challenged Conservation International to synthesize and integrate existing data to see what new insights could we get into many aspects of investment. So natural capital, financial capital, human, social, manufactured capital. And so in six months we were able to fuse about 15 terabytes of data. And with respect to your comment Mukhtar about needing more good stories from Africa, what the Atlas does, it's created a platform for data driven storytelling. Go to the Atlas, it looks like you're looking at slides and maps and photos, but actually those change dynamically as the data, new data are being pulled in. And already the global environment facility, the government of Ethiopia, a total of 12 countries in Africa have already started to use the Atlas as a tool for risk assessment and evaluating assumptions before they make investments. And it's great to see willingness and responsibility and a bigger picture viewpoint from business, but that's larger businesses, whether it's small holder farmers who are struggling to increase their yields and their crops and have little money to invest in the long term. The bulk of African agriculture to be frank, what are we doing there and is it enough? Okay, one of the things I can say is that one aspect particularly around agriculture is how we can build also the resilience of small holder farmers. And one part of it is how are we ensuring as a community that most of what we produce is not going to waste with the implications from an environmental point of view. We know and many might be very surprised to hear this, but actually the continent produces more than it needs. The continent produces about 130% of its food needs, but 60% of that is lost because most of investment goes into increasing productivity and production, which is important. But investing also in the other side on how we are making sure that we are not losing all we produce with all the environmental implications because we know that about 25% of global freshwater and 20% of global farmland are used to grow crops that never gets to be eaten. So by investing in the better handling of post harvest management, then not only the impact from an environmental point of view is important, the impact from a health point of view and nutritional is important, but also the impact from an economic point of view in terms of increasing farmer income to actually invest in their own resilience is also very important. So that's not the only way, but this is also one of important ways in which maybe with one stone we can kill many birds. Let's answer any questions. Sir, please just wait for the microphone if you could let us know where you are or from in your name. Yeah, I'm also from Old Mutual. Paul Boynton. Just maybe the panellists, what do they see as the biggest challenge in this space? What is the most difficult issue going forward that confronts us that we need to solve? I'm hearing that we're solving a lot of problems which is wonderful, but I'm concerned that there are some issues out there which are difficult perhaps and maybe we could just highlight what some of them might be. There have to be roadblocks ahead. Sandy, let's start with you on this one. I see two challenges. One is being able to rapidly scale up solutions that work. It's happening too slowly right now. The second thing is really providing access to capital and financing that enables innovation of whether you're talking about smallholder farmers or urban or peri-urban communities. There's lots of innovation out there, but we need to make the financing and the capital available more easily. I would say two obstacles that I fully agree with you are scaling up. One of them also is the use of the existing technology. If you go to the CGIR network and you look at their website, there's a technology for a lot of things which could help having a smart agriculture. The question is that it's not adaptive. So do a better job to have better adaptation by the farmers of all these technologies which are available if you can help having them a smart agriculture. That's a big question. Institutions, agriculture, sector in Africa are not strong enough to have a fast absorption of the technology and make it available to the farmer. Secondly, financing the public goods aspect is more complicated. It's easier to convince the country to get some electricity which is clean. It's more complicated to find a coordination mechanism so that people protect the coast. Scientists tell us that protecting a portion of a coast doesn't solve the problem because the current just moves on the other part of the coast and the damage is even bigger. So they tell you that you need to do it all along the coast of West Africa. Having a coordination mechanism to finance important investment like that is also a challenge. Lastly is when there is a differential of cost between some technology which are producing and clean technology, have a much faster and easier mechanism to access the resources of that differential. It's still a bit cumbersome and complicated for countries because there are various sources of financing and they are very vertical. They address forests, they address the coast, they address the issue and countries are telling us like Rwanda, I want to have something to finance. My overall, my holistic plan of climate change plan and we don't have yet the proper instrument to do that. Mamadi, your challenge. One thing I will add is actually new solutions and working differently in new situations is important. We need to be able to reinvent ourselves. But I think also it is important to look at good instruments that we have in gender and how do we support them to work. The example I'm going to give is I believe that climate change has received more clout recently. But some regions have been experiencing for longer time. I'm just thinking about the long droughts in the Sahel in the 70s. And I believe that the West African community came up with solutions. For instance, by creating three institutions. The SEALS policy, supposed to coordinate policy efforts among the Sahel countries. The Centre Agreement to provide meteorological information and the Institute of Sahel, which was also to do research. So that's in the 70s. Great approaches. Obviously it was not just enough. But the way we support research, we support access to information, that we have the right policies and implement them and support those institutions like the governance of all of it seems to me also like very important. And this is something I think that in addition to everything that was said and which I agree with, actually is also an important approach. So before we just wrap up, Mamadou, you're in a privileged position of investing in exciting ventures solutions. What's the single most exciting idea proposal you've been confronted with in the past year, let's say? Sorry, can you say it again? Yes. What's the single most exciting solution that you've been confronted with as an investment opportunity for you to fund? Well, actually there are many depending on whether we are talking about urban resilience. Just one. We're already going to talk about the most exciting one you've seen. One of them is really about insurance and particularly for small holder farmers. And this is called R4, which is coming from really a challenge we saw in the Tigray region in Ethiopia. And in partnership with WFP, Oxfam and Swissry, come up with micro insurance for the most vulnerable small holder farmers. Whereby, actually, with the innovation of work for insurance, we were able to address the issue of the challenge that these small holder farmers had to actually pay a premium. And this has actually helped these small holder farmers in times of challenges to be able to access payments that allow them to protect their livelihoods. That, for me, is also something that needs to be scaled beyond and is being right now as well in other countries. Thanks. We're already running out of time. Before we do end, I would just like to help summarise this session by asking each of you. We all have a good level of optimism, which is good. We're a positive, optimistic bunch of people. We believe in the power of collaboration to solve critical challenges is a very good thing. So I'm going to ask each of you what your realistic scenario is for how much progress we're making and what climate change means to Africa, given that, as Sandy says, climate change is the new normal. What can we realistically expect? I think what's needed and what we're really beginning to see is these kinds of holistic system solutions like here in Rwanda, the global resilience partnership, many examples because we're not going to solve climate change problems without breaking down silos and really having partnerships across sectors, across government, private sector, civil society. And I see that now starting to happen. Nectar. I'm very encouraged because moving to COP 22, what I'm hearing is that people want it to be an implementation COP. People want to say, the leader I've heard, they say it was a good meeting in Paris, COP 21. A lot of commitment has been made. We want to make sure that in COP 22 we can sit and say what has been done in between. I think that as we, it's a sea change in the way we are moving things now. And more accountability and commitment that will be taken will be something which will help us build our optimism. And if we are not able to have instrument of accountability on the commitment, we will not be able to have that optimism. So, I'm optimistic, but the proof is in the pudding. Absolutely. What does optimism look like to you? For me, it's also the greater, as was said, commitment, but also looking at not just reaction, but how we prevent, for instance, by bringing those solutions. For instance, the global resilience partnership is looking really about how are we not losing development gains through lack of preparedness, lack of building resilience. And I think that that approach applied to all of the dimensions of climate change issues for me is a source of great optimism. Well, it's been a fascinating discussion. It's always too short, I find, but there's a lot riding on this optimism, so I wish you the very best of luck in implementing and making sure it happens. Thank you all very much for joining us here on this panel. Thank you for joining us here in the room and also those watching us live online on weforum.org. This session is now finished. Thank you.