Nigeria and other African countries should take advantage of the $40 billion Resilience and Sustainability Trust Fund (RSTF) to tackle climate crisis, the International Monetary Fund ,IMF, has advised
Its Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva, who gave the advice in her keynote address at the Global Center on Adaptation’s Africa Adaptation Summit, identified the continent as the worst hit by the consequences of climate change despite contributing the least to the crisis.
The IMF boss noted that African leaders now demonstrate commitment to advancing climate adaptation.
Georgieva said: “The IMF today is a systemically significant institution in the fight against climate change.
We integrate climate in our policy analysis, policy recommendations, and in our financial sector assessments. We integrate it in our public investment management assessments.”
According to her, the IMF has a financing instrument to put its money where its mouth is the Resilience and Sustainability Trust.
“It is now $40 billion-strong. Our mission is to use this money to support countries to unleash the potential of private finance. So, my dream is for the $40 billion to generate $400 billion in financing for adaptation and mitigation in our member countries, she said.
Georgieva explained that in countries that are high emitters, the focus is mitigation, adding that the more countries mitigate, the less they have to adapt.
She said: “In climate-vulnerable countries, the focus is on adaptation and I’m proud that we have many countries from Africa who are thinking of this is the first instrument at the IMF with a long maturity (20 years) and a long grace period (10.5 years). We hope to advance quickly with several of these African countries, as we now have this financial capacity to be a force for good on adaptation
