Africa Climate Summit: Nairobi Declaration makes strong push for accelerated climate action and financing mechanisms.

African leaders, calling for urgent action by developed countries to reduce carbon emissions, have proposed a new financing mechanism to restructure Africa's crippling debt and unlock climate funding.

In a call to action, African leaders attending the inaugural Africa Climate Summit held in Nairobi, Kenya, stressed the importance of decarbonizing the global economy for equality and shared prosperity.

They called for investment to promote the sustainable use of Africa's natural assets for the continent's transition to low carbon development and contribution to global decarbonization.

'We call for a comprehensive and systemic response to the incipient debt crisis outside default frameworks to create the fiscal space that all developing countries need to finance development and climate action,' African leaders said in the Nairobi Declaration on Climate Change and Call to Action, adopted at the conclusion of the Africa Climate Summit.

The Africa Climate Summit (ACS) brought together global leaders, intergovernmental organizations, Regional Economic Communities, United Nations agencies, private sector, civil society organizations, indigenous peoples, local communities, farmer organizations, children, youth, women and academia to discuss Africa's climate change challenges and formulate sustainable solutions.

The leaders expressed concern that many African countries face disproportionate burdens and risks from climate change-related, unpredictable weather events and patterns.

The impacts have included prolonged droughts, devastating floods, wild and forest fires, which cause massive humanitarian crisis with detrimental impacts on economies, health, education, peace and security, among other risks, the leaders said, acknowledging that climate change is the single greatest challenge facing humanity and the single biggest threat to all life on earth.

Underlining that Africa was not historically responsible for global warming, but bore the brunt of its effect, impacting lives, livelihoods, and economies, the leaders emphasized that the continent possessed the potential and the ambition to be a vital component of the global solution to climate change.

'We note that multilateral finance reform is necessary but not sufficient to provide the scale of climate financing the world needs to achieve 45 per cent emission reduction required to meet the Paris 2030 agreements, without which keeping global warming to 1.5% will be in serious jeopardy,' the...