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