Climate change will push more than 130 million people into poverty without sustained efforts to reduce carbon emissions and implement climate adaptation plans. It presents a major threat to the realisation of the Africa’s Agenda 2063. Africa’s continental climate strategy, the AU’s Climate Change and Resilient Development Strategy and Action Plan (2022-2032), aims to preserve people’s livelihoods against unpredictable weather with the core ambition of taking a ‘people-centred’ approach to climate action. Guided by this approach, the strategy identifies social protection as a policy to strengthen vulnerable African states’ capacity to protect against loss and damage and to nurture more resilient populations.  At the onset of the global pandemic, 92% of countries implemented some form of social protection to protect livelihoods and as the climate crisis deepens, Africa must look to social protection as an added layer of protection from the impacts of climate disasters and as a resilience-building tool. The continent remains the more vulnerable to climate disasters and unpacking how to harmonise its loss and damage response through social protection to protect livelihoods and economies is increasingly important.

The experts in this webinar will delve into what social protection is and how it can be amplified as a policy option in African policymaking to address climate change.