Insights into Green Growth in East Africa Gareth Phillips, Chief Climate Change Officer & OIC PECG2 These slides reflect the views of the speaker and are not necessarily the views of the African Development Bank

Green Growth in East Africa Contents GG policies and strategies in East Africa Implementation challenges Case study Conclusions / for discussion

GG policies and strategies in East Africa Kenya – Green Economy Strategy and Implementation Plan Rwanda – Green Growth and Climate Resilience Strategy Ethiopia – Climate Resilient Green Economy Uganda - Green Growth Development Strategy AfDB – Green Growth Framework – defining levels of intervention at project and program level and a ten year target to transition to Green Inclusive Growth With support from multiple Development Partners – EU, DFID, Germany, Korea, Multilateral Funds – GCF, and institutions including SWITCH to green, GGGI and GGKP

Green Growth is a moving target Defining GG remains a challenge, partly because the goal-posts are moving all the time Is it a process (e.g. a management system) or a performance standard? GG policies and projects should address multiple criteria, though the weighting applied varies widely. Should energy be prioritized? Governance and transparency Labour, women and youth rights Environmental and social performance Triple bottom line / inclusive growth Good / best available technology Resource use efficiency Compliance with NDC / long term strategy Contribution to SDGs

Benefits of Green Growth GG means (amongst other things) growing clean now rather than growing at any cost and cleaning up later Growing green has multiple benefits and should be (financially) rewarded: Lower risk / high sustainability resulting in better long term prospects Greater resource use efficiency = lower costs Less supply chain management Marketing benefits = better revenues Better employment prospects More resilient economic growth Fewer / lower social or public costs Better resource use efficiency Contributions towards NDC and SDGs

The problem is… There is no financing mechanism GG suffers from a lack of a financing mechanism for a number of reasons: It is not the subject of a UN convention Several existing conventions overlap significantly (UNFCCC, CoB; CoD…) The GREEN Climate Fund is not particularly green, its focus is climate Green Bonds are certainly in fashion but they fund their own definition of green growth… ….there is no clear or agreed definition of GG It is hard to distinguish GG from “good practice” – the additionality question FONERWA in Rwanda has raised almost USD100m to fund GG projects

Case study – Atmospheric Space The UNFCCC / Paris Agreement can be seen as a sub-sector of GG The scarce resource is atmospheric space to dump waste CO2 We have a global voluntary agreement on how the remaining “2 degree” space can be used (NDCs) Voluntary commitments are driving down absolute emissions and GHG emission intensity (T CO2 per unit output) Funds are available from both public and private sources Policies are being implemented to favour reductions in emissions with developed and some developing countries looking at trading regimes. Others considering taxes We are learning about the impacts of these policies on international competitiveness and trade

Conclusions / for discussion Resource use efficiency – there are many resources which we need to manage better and GG can provide a platform However we are hampered without a common definition of GG The Paris Agreement / UNFCCC does this for GHG emissions Can GG build on climate finance and broaden the scope or are we bound to focus on GHG and energy? And/or Can we raise funds to apply GG to other resources? (FONERWA did) Can regional integration help to harmonize the definition of GG and address the competitiveness issues which will arise when Govts start to implement GG policies and strategies? And finally, countries that we think of as green today did not necessarily arrive where they are now by adopting GG policies and strategies

Thankyou for your attention Contact: Gareth Phillips, Chief Climate and Green Growth Officer – PECG2 g.phillips@afdb.org