Africa has chosen to speak with one voice ahead of the UN’s major climate conference. On two fronts at once, health and finance, the continent wants the world to understand that the climate crisis is no longer a distant threat but a reality already hitting its people and its budgets.
The first signal came from the medical journal The Lancet. Serving health ministers, former ministers and climate scientists from across the continent are calling on the World Health Organization to declare the climate crisis a Public Health Emergency of International Concern, the highest alert level available to the agency. They argue that droughts, floods, extreme heat, food insecurity and disease outbreaks warrant the same mobilisation as the world’s major health crises.
The signatories’ accounts sketch a map of the threats. In Senegal, Minister of Health and Social Action Ibrahima Sy describes a West Africa squeezed between rising waters along its coasts and severe droughts inland. In Namibia, his counterpart Esperance Luvindao speaks of families losing harvests when the rains fail, communities cut off from clinics by floods and a resurgence of malaria in the north of the country. She is calling for financing that countries can actually access, earlier detection of outbreaks and health facilities able to keep running when extreme weather strikes. In Zimbabwe, Minister Douglas Mombeshora stresses that women, children and communities living off natural resources bear the heaviest burden. According to the signatories, such a WHO declaration could speed up investment in resilient hospitals and disease early warning systems.
The second front is financial, and it opens in Antalya, Türkiye, where COP31 begins on Monday. The African Group of Negotiators, which represents the continent’s 54 countries and is chaired this year by Ghana’s Antwi-Boasiako Amoah, warns that a move away from fossil fuels cannot be called just if low- and middle-income countries must mortgage their economic future to achieve it. According to analysis presented by its chair, more than two-thirds of low-income countries are already unable to meet their sovereign debt obligations or face a high risk of debt distress. Africa’s most climate-vulnerable countries devote nearly two-thirds of their revenue to debt service, roughly 25 times more than they spend on climate action.
The group has built its agenda around three demands. First, it wants predictable finance that matches the true cost of national climate commitments. Second, it is calling for a decisive shift from sovereign loans to grants and concessional finance that do not deepen fiscal deficits. Third, it wants funds to flow directly through African financial institutions, national and regional, for faster and better-governed deployment. Negotiators are also pushing for adaptation finance to be tripled to around $120 billion a year by 2035, for a just transition mechanism that actually works and for safeguards against trade penalties targeting green industrial strategies. The group has also written to the UN climate secretariat asking for adaptation finance, trade and the Green Climate Fund to be added as separate items on the agenda.
Expectations are high, and so is mistrust. The loss-and-damage pledges made at previous summits remain largely unfulfilled, and the UN Environment Programme now estimates developing countries’ annual adaptation needs at $305 billion by 2035. The continent does, however, hold some leverage: COP32 will take place next year in Addis Ababa. For African negotiators, debt relief and finance that does not create debt will remain the real test of climate justice, in Antalya as in Ethiopia.