Closing remarks by Ms Barbara Creecy, Minister of Environment, Fisheries and Forestry of South Africa and President of the African Ministerial on Environment (AMCEN) on the occasion of the AMCEN briefing at United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change CoP 25.

Madrid, Spain, 08 December 2019

Africa remains committed to a successful outcome at COP 25 being held under the auspices of the UNFCCC. We also wish to extend our support to the COP25  President, the Ms Carolina Schmidt, Honourable Minister of Environment of Chile and wish to also extend our sincere appreciation to the Government of the Kingdom of Spain for stepping in on such short notice to host the UNFCCC COP25 in this beautiful city of Madrid.

Today we have received presentations from 2 African Climate Change Commissions established at COP 22 in Marrakech relating to the Sahel and the Congo Basin. We also received briefings on the Africa Adaptation Initiative which aims to support African countries in tackling the growing adaptation challenges.

Finally, we also received briefings from our African Group of Negotiators. The presentations and discussions focussed on amongst others the following key priority issues:

• The special circumstances of the African continent which includes both our history of colonialism and underdevelopment, our current reality of unemployment, inequality, poverty, infrastructure backlogs and indebtness.
• The African Continent is already facing severe and widespread impacts of climate change that are diverting revenue required for broader development objectives into adaptation initiatives and emergency interventions.
• This circumstances means that Africa requires the international community to set clear goals with timelines  and targets for adapting to climate change as envisaged in the Paris Agreement.
• With regards to Article 6, Africa must be clearly an equitable beneficiary of the market mechanisms and wants a clear share of proceeds from both article 6.2 and 6.4 going towards the Adaptation Fund.
  
  

Lastly, we stress the importance of new, additional, predictable and adequate finance, technology and capacity building.

We believe that ambition for action must be matched with ambition for support.