Hundreds of millions pledged for African carbon credits at inaugural climate summit

investing.com:

By Duncan Miriri

NAIROBI (Reuters) -An initiative to boost Africa's carbon credit production 19-fold by 2030 drew hundreds of millions of dollars of pledges on Monday as Kenyan President William Ruto opened the continent's first climate summit.

In one of the most anticipated deals of the summit, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) committed to buying $450 million of carbon credits from the Africa Carbon Markets Initiative (ACMI).

The ACMI was launched at Egypt's COP27 summit last year. African leaders are pushing market-based financing instruments such as carbon credits, which allow polluters to offset emissions through activities like planting trees or investing in renewable energy projects. (See EXPLAINER for more details)

Organisers of the three-day summit in Nairobi say they aim to showcase Africa as a destination for climate investment rather than a victim of floods, drought and famine.

African governments see carbon credits and other market-based financing instruments as critical to mobilize funding that has been slow to arrive from rich-world donors. Africa has received only about 12% of the money it needs to cope with climate impacts, according to a report last year by the non-profit Climate Policy Initiative.

«For a very long time we have looked at this as a problem. It is time we flipped and looked at it from the other side,» Ruto told delegates.

«We must see in green growth not just a climate imperative but also a fountain of multi-billion dollar economic opportunities that Africa and the world is primed to capitalise,» he said.

Several speakers at the summit, however, said they had seen little progress toward accelerating climate financing.

«There hasn't been any success for an African country in attracting