AfDB 2009 Annual Meetings will be Carbon Friendly –Vice President

Tunis, April 30, GNA – The African Development Bank (AfDB)

Group has officially made this year's Annual Meetings Carbon

friendly, following the acquisition of carbon credits worth €85,400 to

offset CO2 emissions due to the meetings scheduled to take place

from May 13-14 in Dakar, Senegal.
“With great pleasure I would like to inform you that our Annual

meetings for this year are officially carbon neutral,” Vice President

Zeinab El-Bakri announced in Tunis on Wednesday, noting that the

Dakar meeting has been certified carbon neutral and designated

“AfDB Climate Friendly Conference” by Atmosfair, a leading NGO

that has been pioneering the process of carbon offsets.

Mrs. El-Bakri said the amount paid to acquire the carbon neutral

2009 annual meetings was based on estimates of past experiences.

Some 1,200 people from various parts of Africa and the world will

travel to the meetings.
“Having purchased these carbon credits, we have been issued the

attached official certificate. With that, we can now claim that our

meeting is carbon neutral and hence, a climate friendly event,” she

added.
Annual Meetings CO2 emissions are related to flights, local

transport, paper and energy consumption both at the meeting venue

and hotels, among others, which cannot be avoided but must be

offset.
The amounts NGO's generate by selling reduction certificates in

the voluntary market are utilized to implement CO2 reduction projects

within developing countries.
Carbon Trading is a market based mechanism for helping mitigate

the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere. The transaction was born out

of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change in 1997.
It is now considered to be the most complex commodity market in

the world. Some US$ 90 billion were traded on the world market in

2007. If adopted worldwide, future transactions will dwarf this figure.

Meanwhile, the Bank Group has joined the global call for efficient

management of the threats posed by climate change by producing a

strategy to address climate risks to sustained economic growth in

Africa, and promote political stability in the world.

The Bank Group's Boards of Directors approved the Climate

Risk Management and Adaptation Strategy (CRMA) on Wednesday

in Tunis, paving the way for its implementation.
The strategy is informed by the underlying notion that the African

continent is the most vulnerable to climate change and climate

variability, a situation compounded by low adaptive capacity.

It is also based on expert projections that all sub-regions of Africa

will experience a temperature rise likely to be larger than the average in

other parts of the world.
Most parts of Africa are also expected to experience reduced

average annual rainfall and increased aridity and droughts. This should

result in net drying and increased aridity over a greater proportion of

the continent.
Through regional stakeholder consultation forums and

recommendations of the Bank President's Working Group on Climate

Change, the CRMA seeks to ensure progress towards the eradication

of poverty and contribute to sustainable improvement in people's

livelihoods in the Bank's Regional Member Countries.

GNA