Owing to South Africa’s investment plan requiring much more money to be properly and fully implemented, President Cyril Ramaphosa on Tuesday called for reforms of multilateral development banks, international financing institutions and the mobilisation of commercial banks to meet the needs of developing economies for sustainable development and climate resilience.

Ramaphosa was delivering a National Statement, at COP27, held in Egypt.  

He highlighted that African countries were losing between 3% and 5% of their gross domestic product owing to the effects of climate change.

South Africa recently endorsed the national Just Energy Transition Investment Plan as a basis for its pathway towards a low carbon, climate resilient society.

However, it will need about $98-billion over the next five years to enable a just transition and achieve the ambitious targets the country has set.

Ramaphosa explained that the plan includes a portfolio of investments across the electricity sector, green hydrogen sector and new energy vehicle sector, and also said financing mechanisms from public finance institutions and commercial institutions needed to provide good concessional loans and further stressed that more grants or non-debt instruments needed to be considered.

Ramaphosa said, at present, multilateral support is out of reach for the majority of the world’s population, owing to lending policies that are risk averse and that carry onerous costs and conditionalities.

“We have already communicated the structuring of the offer that they made to us at Glasgow, that we need to restructure and have more grants, as already we can see that our investment plan requires much more money to be properly and fully implemented,” he added.

He noted that at COP26 in Glasgow last year, France, Germany, the UK, the US and the European Union offered support in the form of a Just Energy Transition Partnership.

“It is our hope that this partnership will offer a ground-breaking approach to funding by developed countries for the ambitious but necessary mitigation and adaptation goals of developing countries,” Ramaphosa said.

He went on to say that a number of “beneficial” bilateral meetings were held, aimed at consolidating common views on climate action, on the just transition, as well as on funding processes.

“We believe that it is only with substantial support that Africa can build the resilience that is required to build, to protect itself and safeguard our economies. It is only with significant additional funding that we can ensure that future generations of South Africans and indeed Africa at large live in an environment that is clean, conducive to health and wellbeing and that has not been destroyed because of the inaction of today’s leaders,” concluded Ramaphosa.