Stakeholder’s Perspectives on Carbon and Climate Finance in West Africa: Barriers and Opportunities

This report provides an unprecedented view of the state of climate & carbon finance in West Africa.

Objectives of the scoping study include:

• Providing an overview of current flows and administration of climate and carbon finance in West Africa with an assessment of scale and pace of mitigation investments;
• Identifying opportunities and ways carbon markets and climate finance can deliver support to West Africa’s climate change mitigation efforts in the context of the Paris Agreement;
• Identifying barriers hindering effective market participation by publication developers in West Africa, including the use of financing instruments for scaling up mitigation investments.

Africa will need to invest more than USD 3 trillion in mitigation and adaptation by 2030 in order to implement its Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), a sizable share of which will need to be channeled to West Africa. To date, West African countries have only accessed a small portion of global climate finance flows, with analysis suggesting the region has received only 4.4 percent of global flows from the major climate finance funds since 2006. New mechanisms introduced under the Paris Agreement, however, can play a critical role in unlocking climate change mitigation investments across the region. In particular, market mechanisms, de-risked by public climate finance can mobilize significant volumes of private sector investment for mitigation activities

The results of this study suggest that barriers to implementing climate change mitigation publications in West Africa generally span four different areas: technical capacity, access to finance, and institutional and political barriers.

This work was developed using the database developed by AERA group and with support from the West African Alliance Secretariat and Coordinator.