I’m Jarredine Morris, I am the Co-Head of Carbon Trust Africa and Associate Director with The Carbon Trust. We are a global organisation. We’re operating across Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa and South America. We are a predominantly mission-led organisation, and our mission is to accelerate the shift to a low carbon and decarbonised future.
We have a few what we call practice areas that span across the organisation, and, again, we focus on different areas and different regions based on the needs.
So I’ll focus on the Africa region. We do some work with corporate clients, in manufacturing and industry as well as in sustainable finance. We work a lot with mining organisations in South Africa and in the region, with manufacturing, ICT and then also with financial institutions.
A lot of that work is focused on helping them understand their emissions profile and looking for opportunities where they can decarbonise through their value chains and their direct operations.
And then we also do work in, I suppose, more the public sector space or what we think of as kind of manifesto. So that’s really impact-driven, mission-driven kind of work. There we work a lot on energy transitions, and the focus of that is moving towards renewables-led electricity systems in particular, but also looking more broadly at energy use and how we can decarbonise that.
And then we have a strong focus on energy access through our benches and innovation work, and that is focused on ensuring that there is affordable and reliable access to clean energy. This is very much in line with the sustainable development goal seven.
As the African team from our South African office, we recently finished working with the World Bank and some other partners, including the CSIR and Meridian Economics, to develop South Africa’s offshore wind roadmap. So that should be published in the next couple of months. That’s quite exciting.
There is quite a lot of opportunity for offshore wind for South Africa along our entire coastline. It gives a lot of opportunities for again, decarbonisation, but just diversification around the energy sources. It gives a lot of economic opportunities, particularly around green hydrogen and looking at high energy use.
So there’s a lot of talk about data centres which would be high energy users and other industrial processes and off shore wind gives a good opportunity to provide those with clean energy.
Last year, we also completed a study around the community ownership of renewable energy, and that was quite interesting. It was quite a preliminary, high-level study, and in some ways gave us more questions than answers, but we do want to do more work on that, because I think some of the key findings around that, considering if development is the objective, we must really ensure that we give access to energy to communities. Even in South Africa, because affordability in particular, is a challenge in South Africa.
What are different models that we can leverage to make that happen and particularly looking at innovative climate finance opportunities around enabling community ownership?
Then I think the last couple to mention: We have our Transforming Energy Access (TEA) programme. This is a programme across sub-Saharan Africa that we operate that is very focused on energy access as well and it looks at the development of technologies and business models that enable an inclusive energy transition.
This is a wide programme that we operate in conjunction with the UK government in this case and with some other philanthropic funding.
Then we have our Powering Renewable Energy Opportunities or PREO programme. This is also focused on innovation and incubation of SMMEs, looking at local ideas and helping incubate them into operation, but focusing particularly on a productive use of energy, such as looking at cooling, again, energy access, different innovations to actually get energy to help with the productive use in the economy and help build economic growth off the back of renewable energy.
So I think in, in some cases, yes, and in some cases, no. Again, it differs from country to country across the regions that we work in. In South Africa, we’ve obviously seen a big shift in policy that is making it more possible for people to invest and come into the space and build up more green economic opportunities.
I think that there are still some challenges not directly related to, let’s say energy policy specifically, but looking at some of our economic policies, some of our localisation policies, these can still be a little bit challenging. So getting those supply chains up and running, and it can in some ways make the cost quite prohibitive. But I do believe there’s a lot of work happening across the space to make it happen.
In Nigeria, for example, they’ve had a recent shift where they’ve moved away from subsidising petrol and diesel. And so that policy change has really led to an increasing uptake in small-scale renewable energy in the country, because they are very reliant on petrol and diesel generators for their electricity use at a household level and at a production level.
But again, this change has meant that renewable energy is much more cost-effective. So it’s just galvanised that change almost unintentionally, but it has helped the growth of renewable energy uptake.
We have a programme under our TEA umbrella called Z-Gen, which is specifically aiming at switching out petrol and diesel gensets, as we call them, your gennies, for renewable energy solutions. So that’s a really good innovation that we’ve seen take off since that policy change in Nigeria.
So I do you think that there are changes, in some cases intentional in terms of policy, in some cases unintentional, you know, when there’s just a policy change for maybe another reason, but it has helped increase and galvanise the uptake of renewable energy.
I do think the green economy presents unique opportunities for the continent. It’s often been said that South Africa has an abundance of natural resources in terms of the green economy. And yes, across the continent, there is an abundance of solar and wind resources, obviously for renewable energy generation. But again, it’s also been said without too much detail that we have a lot of the critical minerals that are necessary for a lot of these new technologies.
I mentioned data centres earlier. I’ve heard even at those conferences that there are a lot of opportunities around these really big data centres, as everybody shifts to the cloud and we move to AI and all of these things.
And so the demand for these critical minerals for renewable energy technologies and also for ICT growth, all of these, will continue to grow. So that does present an opportunity for the African continent to be able to meet that demand. And I think it’s really important that we do that in a sustainable way.
So looking at solutions around things like climate smart mining, net zero mining, ensuring that operations don’t essentially kick the can up the road in a sense and just shift some of the emissions problems and socioeconomic problems up the value chain towards the extraction to meet this demand that everybody sees as green and good. You know, we need to be very mindful and careful around that. But definitely enormous opportunities.
I also think there are opportunities around manufacturing and production. Again, we have a lot of people across the continent who are looking for work. This is in some way very medium skilled labour that’s required in a sense to roll out the manufacturing for a lot of the components and to do a lot of the beneficiation of these minerals.
And so again, there are opportunities, if designed correctly, to look at creating green industrial hubs. Looking at something like our SEZ model, but connecting that specifically with green industrial use and that helps diversify our manufacturing and economic opportunities as well into these new areas. So significant opportunity there.
In terms of carbon markets, as you say, quite nascent. I think again there are quite a lot of carbon credit raising programmes and projects across Africa. There has been quite a bit of backlash recently just around double counting of these and whether they are actually benefiting local communities. So there’s been a lot more scrutiny in the voluntary carbon markets that’s been looking at this.
There is the IVCM, the international voluntary organisation that sets out 10 really good guiding principles for the good governance of voluntary carbon markets. And more and more standards are ensuring that they align with these things, particularly around the additionality: where is the additional benefit to these carbon credit raising programmes, both in terms of socio economic lens, but also in making sure that there is a permanent emissions reduction. Because that was another question that is whether some of these projects do result in in a permanent emission reduction.
So I think that’s good that the scrutiny is increasing. It does mean that there is the opportunity for more and more carbon credits to be raised in a good and sustainable way.
More locally, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange a couple of years ago released a platform to trade carbon credits. So that’s also quite good. I believe that they are starting to trade across that platform and getting some good traction in that space. So, I do think it’s absolutely growing, particularly the voluntary market space and linking up with international markets as well, which is quite good.
Again, I think in principle carbon credits should be a last mile decarbonisation mechanism. By that I mean, there are a lot of opportunities for real decarbonisation of looking at your own production, looking at your electricity use, and so, through our work, we always encourage entities to leverage all the mechanisms for real emission reductions as far as possible before they try and leverage credits.
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