African leaders called for wide-ranging debt relief and a flood of climate finance to help the continent boost its electricity generation from renewable sources almost sixfold by 2030, Bloomberg News reported. In a declaration signed by leaders at the inaugural Africa Climate Summit in the Kenyan capital, Nairobi, they called for the tenor of sovereign loans to be extended, debt pauses when climate disasters strike and a 10-year grace period on interest payments. Those measures would go some way to allowing some of the world’s most vulnerable countries to bolster their climate resilience and develop their economies, according to the document. The declaration, the leaders said, will serve as a basis for the continent’s common position going into the United Nations’ global climate summit, COP28, in Dubai later this year. There is need “for a comprehensive and systemic response to the incipient debt crisis outside of default frameworks to create the fiscal space that all developing countries need to finance development and climate action,” the leaders said in the so-called Nairobi Declaration on Wednesday.
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