Renewable Energy Investment in Africa and NDCs

The Paris Agreement marked the beginning of a new international bottom-up approach to climate change where all countries submitted Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), outlining  the intended actions of  a nation to respond to climate change. Typically, most developing country NDCs comprise conditional contributions contingent upon international support and unconditional contributions that the country intends to carry out regardless.

A working paper by Miquel Muñoz Cabré and Mohamed Youba Sokona analyzes the 53 African NDCs submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in order to quantify the renewable energy investment embodied in those contributions. The authors identify international multi-donor public funds that are active in renewable energy project finance in Africa and highlight the importance of energy access and its inclusion in NDCs.

The authors determine that the importance of renewable energy in Africa is poised to increase over the next decade, possibly drastically, opening substantial investment opportunities. NDCs can help the process by providing de facto investment maps, as well as strengthening national renewable energy plans and potentially attracting climate finance. As this paper studies the first generation of NDCs, prepared prior to the Paris Agreement, the authors determine that new research will need to be conducted with respect to the next generation of NDCs. By then, the renewable energy landscape in Africa may have evolved significantly.