Climate change will push more than 130 million people into poverty if there are not sustained efforts to reduce carbon emissions and implement climate adaptation plans. It presents a major threat to the realisation of the AU ambition for each member state to attain at least middle-income status by 2063. Africa’s first continental climate strategy, the AU Climate Change and Resilient Development Strategy and Action Plan (2022–2032), aims to preserve livelihoods amid climate change through a people-centred approach to climate action. Guided by this approach, the strategy identifies social protection as a way to strengthen the capacity of vulnerable states to protect against loss and damage and build resilience. Social protection is not a new policy response to crisis – the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic saw the near-global dispersion of emergency funds to support citizens. Social protection’s ability to address poverty and inequality also enables it to help those populations most affected by climate change to recover from disaster.