Climate Change and Conflict: Africa’s Renewable Energy Paradox | OilPrice.com
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Breaking News:
ByHaley Zaremba- Jan 14, 2025, 4:00 PM CSTAfrica’s urgent need to expand its energy infrastructure while transitioning to renewable sources is creating a complex and potentially volatile situation.
Competition for resources and influence from foreign investors, coupled with weak governance and regulatory frameworks, is increasing the risk of conflict and disputes.
The legal landscape is also evolving, with potential for increased litigation arising from climate change commitments and energy sector reforms.
The African continent is faced with an extremely difficult energy ‘trilemma’ – the largely underdeveloped bloc needs to find a way to manage its energy production and imports in a way that balances sufficient and reliable energy with affordability and sustainability. Achieving all three of these essential axes is extremely difficult, particularly in the short timeline African leaders are faced with. Africa has some of the most underdeveloped energy grids on the planet, and is simultaneously facing the world’s biggest population boom. The continent’s population is expected to double between now and 2050; by midcentury, a quarter of the global population will be in sub-Saharan Africa. The result will be a rapidly expanding energy and infrastructure gap in the coming decades. Today, around 600 million people in Africa completely lack access to electricity, and the continent’s energy demand is expected to increase threefold over the next decade as sub-Saharan Africa grows, develops, and industrializes. Meeting this demand would require power generation capacity to increase ten-fold by 2065.
‘;document.write(write_html);}Despite contributing the least to global greenhouse gas emissions, African nations are poised to suffer the most and the soonest from climate change. So while developing their national economies and bringing electricity to their populations is of utmost importance to the leadership of African nations, so too is keeping additional greenhouse gas emissions out of the atmosphere. For these reasons, experts agree that Africa will have to “leapfrog” over the use of fossil fuels – traditionally the next step in economic development – straight into developing wide-scale renewable resources. The scale of the effort required to achieve this leapfrog presents critical challenges for African nations, which largely lack strong governance, resources, and capacities to achieve such dramatic overhauls in infrastructure and policies. The sector is contending with a number of overlapping and potentially destabilizing forces, including climate change initiatives and policies, ‘resource nationalism’ and competition over critical minerals, and increasing foreign exchange and control in the African energy and resource sectors.’;document.write(write_html);}else