In the coming days the world’s gaze will turn to Belém, Brazil, as COP30 convenes under the canopy of the Amazon. There, the global climate community will confront a defining question: Can money truly buy justice? COP30 is expected to build on COP29’s legacy by operationalising the $1.3 trillion annual climate finance target by 2035, a pledge meant to close the widening gap between ambition and reality.
The roadmap, initiated by Azerbaijan and now guided by Brazil, aims to scale public–private investments, reformed carbon markets, and financial restructuring, alongside stronger accountability and grant-based support.
Brazil’s presidency has already framed its agenda around Amazon protection, equity, and resilience for vulnerable nations. Yet the political economy of climate finance remains stubbornly unequal. For Africa and much of the Global South, the real struggle is not only to access finance but to reclaim agency over its purpose and governance. The tension runs deeper than numbers on a balance sheet. Beneath the trillion-dollar headlines lies a moral reckoning: Who defines climate finance, and who benefits from its flow?
In Nairobi, Abuja, and Dakar, policymakers see both promise and peril. Billions were pledged in Paris (2015) and Glasgow (2021), yet less than 20 percent of that capital reached the continent. Meanwhile, African countries like Malawi and Mozambique continue to suffer devastating floods, and Sudan and Ethiopia face cascading droughts – while their adaptation budgets shrink under the weight of debt servicing
The Mirage of Climate Finance: Reform or Rebranding?
The $1.3 trillion target sounds transformational. Yet, most of this money will not arrive as grants but it will come as loans, equity investments, or carbon credits, mediated through private finance. Which leads to a piercing question: Is the green transition being built on debt? The shorthand answer is: yes. What has emerged is that the climate finance architecture increasingly mirrors the conditionalities of the structural adjustment era.
“Green loans” are tied to policy reforms and fiscal discipline, often prioritising investor confidence over community well-being. Africa’s sovereign debt crisis, already acute, is being exacerbated by the cost of adaptation itself. Unfortunately, this is a cruel irony for a continent that contributed less than 4 percent of global emissions.
In Kenya, the government’s green infrastructure loans have pushed debt above 70 percent of GDP. Zambia’s 2023 debt-for-nature swap, hailed as a breakthrough, has been criticized for externalizing control over its forests. In Nigeria, green bond programmes face volatility due to exchange-rate instability, while Ghana’s climate adaptation loans arrive with IMF supervision clauses that restrict domestic policy flexibility.
So, we must ask: When climate finance arrives as credit, can it ever be called justice? If climate finance merely rebrands the old instruments of dependency, then the “just transition” risks becoming a mirage hence it is another exercise in rebranding colonial finance under a green flag or veneer. As the age-worn cliché puts: It is new wine in old wine skin.
Carbon Markets as Africa’s Opportunity or Another Extraction Frontier?
At the heart of COP30’s agenda lies a seductive proposition: carbon markets. In theory, they offer Africa a way to monetise its abundant natural assets such as forests, wetlands, and mangroves while attracting billions in investment. But the central question still remains: Can Africa trade carbon without trading away sovereignty? We all know the answer. In Kenya, the Shamba Project promised smallholder farmers sustainable income but delivered little beyond paperwork and unmet expectations.
In Zimbabwe, the Kariba REDD+ project collapsed amid allegations of mismanagement and inequitable revenue sharing. In Nigeria REDD+ project in Cross River State ends up criminalising indigenous people who are custodians of nature while transnational elite plot how to share national commons. These are not isolated failures; in fact, they reveal a structural pattern where carbon ownership lies offshore while ecological risk remains local.
National Commons and the Battle for Climate Sovereignty
Africa’s national commons, its forests, rivers, soils, and carbon-rich savannas are the lifeblood of its economies and cultures. Yet these shared treasures are increasingly being enclosed under the banner of “green growth.” Through carbon offset deals, conservation finance, and biodiversity bonds, foreign actors are acquiring control over vast landscapes once managed by local communities. The tragedy is that what should be a foundation of sovereignty has become a frontier of speculation.
The REDD+ projects in Nigeria’s Cross River State, for instance, were meant to protect the forest but instead restricted local access while global intermediaries monetized the carbon stored within it. Similar patterns emerge in Kenya’s rangelands, where carbon credit schemes reward investors more than pastoralists.
At stake is not merely money, it’s ownership. Who controls Africa’s national commons determines who shapes its green future. COP30 offers Africa an opportunity to reclaim the commons not as collateral for debt, but as a moral and ecological inheritance one that must serve its people first.
Yet, there are glimmers of hope. Gabon, a leader in rainforest protection, has pioneered sovereign carbon credits under Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, demonstrating how African countries can define their own carbon integrity standards. Rwanda and Senegal are building national registries to curb “carbon laundering,” while Nigeria’s carbon market framework seeks to integrate subnational participation into federal policy. But will green capital allow local agency or reinforce existing peripheralisation and unequal exchange?
Still, the warning signs are clear. If measurement, reporting, and verification remain under foreign control, carbon trading could become the new scramble for Africa hence it is the “carbon plantations” of the 21st century replacing the oil wells of the 20th. So, what Africa has succeeded in achieving is closing one door on exploitation of fossil fuel while opening new one in carbon offset scheme that only benefit is creating new “green billionaires”. So, Africa’s carbon future must be built on integrity, equity, and local ownership. Only by creating continental institutions that govern benefit-sharing and transparency can carbon finance evolve into a development instrument, not another extraction frontier.
Debt, Dependency, and the Politics of the Green Transition
Africa’s energy transition is entangled with its debt burden. Over 20 African nations are now in or near debt distress, even as they are urged to invest heavily in clean energy. Which provokes an unsettling question: Can nations decarbonise while still colonised by debt? Take South Africa’s Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP). Supposedly, an $8.5 billion deal with Western donors intended to help phase out coal. Initially celebrated as a model, it now faces criticism for loan-heavy financing that tightens fiscal pressure while neglecting coal worker livelihoods.
In Egypt, COP27 (I was fortunate to have attended with private capital) demonstrated African leadership but also exposed the fragility of multilateral promises. Despite loud commitments to “loss and damage,” actual disbursements remain marginal barely 10 percent of what the continent requires annually for adaptation. This dynamic reveals an uncomfortable truth: Africa is being asked to transition without transformation.
Essentially, we are to decarbonise while trapped in a global economy that profits from its vulnerability – Is it a case of climate profiteering (green greed) disguised as environmental salvation? Until the debt architecture itself is restructured, no amount of green rhetoric can deliver justice. A truly just transition demands financial decolonisation through the rewriting of global rules, not merely the reallocation of funds.
Local Innovation and Indigenous Wisdom: The Real Engines of Change
Amid the global negotiations and jargon, Africa’s most radical climate leadership is emerging not from conference halls but from communities. In Kaduna, Nigeria, solar cooperatives are lighting rural homes left behind by the grid. In Ghana’s Northern Region, women’s groups are using solar dryers for shea production, linking gender empowerment with climate resilience. In Rwanda, electric motorcycles moto e-taxis have reshaped urban mobility and created green jobs. These stories illustrate a profound truth: the just transition is not imported rather it is already alive across Africa.
Again, we ask: What if Africa’s greatest climate solution is not finance, but imagination?
Ownership of knowledge is key to Africa green future. By valuing indigenous knowledge alongside science Africa can overcome epistemic dependency which has shaped national outcomes. Traditional water harvesting in the Sahel, rotational farming among the Maasai, and community forest conservation in the Congo Basin embody centuries of ecological wisdom.
Yet, these systems remain undervalued in a global order that privileges data over tradition and GDP over dignity. For the just transition to be truly just, indigenous knowledge must stand alongside science, and community-led solutions must inform global policy. The world’s climate future may depend on how seriously it listens to Africa’s ancient lessons on balance and renewal.
Rethinking Climate Justice: From Charity to Sovereignty
A just transition cannot be reduced to compensatory frameworks where those who polluted pay those who didn’t. Justice is not a transaction rather it is a transformation. What does sovereignty look like in a decarbonizing world? It means ownership over resources, data, and decisions. It means ensuring that Africa’s solar corridors, from the Sahara to the Kalahari, and its geothermal treasures from Kenya to Djibouti, power African homes before foreign markets.
It means designing a climate finance system where Africans are not clients but partners, not recipients but rule-makers. This vision does not reject cooperation. It insists on equity, reciprocity, and shared prosperity. The future of climate governance must rest on solidarity, not charity, on co-creation, not conditionality.
Who Owns the Future?
As delegates gather beneath the Amazon canopy, COP30 will once again echo with speeches, pledges, and applause. But Africa must ask harder questions: Will this be another season of promises or the beginning of planetary justice? Will the next chapter of the climate story be written in the language of power or the language of equity? At COP30, Africa stands at a decisive crossroads. Africa is at the threshold of rewriting its history and it is also at a point where its history is being rewritten for it.
We can either remain governed by green capital, or it can lead the world toward a new paradigm of ecological sovereignty and moral leadership. The answer will not be written in communiqués or pledges. It will be forged in the courage of African nations, cities, and communities that refuse to be defined by vulnerability and instead, claim authorship of their own climate destiny.
When the curtains fall in Belém and the applause fades, one truth will remain: Who owns the green future? The answer is blowing in the Amazon wind waiting for Africa to claim it.
By Sadiq Austine Igomu Okoh, PhD (Climate Governance/Net-Zero & Energy Transition/GHG Accounting/Capacity Building Expert)