COP29 Could be a Watershed for Zambia, for Africa, for the World.
Zambia can play a leading role in meeting the world’s climate goals. And smart COP29 negotiations can forge practical solutions to boost entire African economies, including the mining industry.
With the US elections in the rear-view mirror, COP29 is about to happen. What is COP29, and why is it important?
There is so much background information, statistics about how the world’s climate has changed, and predictions about where we will find ourselves if we don’t change course by certain dates, that COP29 is already a blur in the attention span even of those of us who should be acutely engaged. (And that’s all of us!)
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, known as COP, meets for the 29th occasion between 11-22 November. Thousands of delegates, from practically all countries, will gather in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan later this month.
There’s a degree of irony in the venue, as there was for last year’s COP28 held in Dubai in the UAE: these are petrostates. Nonetheless, their wealth, like that of all developed nations whether built on oil or other sources, is needed to enable the transition away from fossil fuels – and is already being invested towards this objective.
It’s a critical moment for the world. Our climate emergency is plain to see, not least in southern Africa where we are experiencing the worst drought in a century. Zambia, together with neighbouring countries, has declared a drought disaster. The country relies on hydroelectric power, which has of course dried up. Households, schools, businesses and industries – including the mines – need to operate on about three hours of power a day.
COP29 has two key agenda points. One is to formalise last year’s COP28 commitment to switch to green energy solutions towards the goal of keeping global warming at no higher than 1.5°C compared to about 200 years ago, before mass industrialisation.
Every single country has agreed to ramp up their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to climate change, including renewables programmes, to get to net-zero carbon emissions, fast. There are two interrelated questions flowing from this: Why has so little progress been made, and – the second main agenda issue – where is the money going to come from? For good reason it is being dubbed the pivotal ‘Finance COP’, because we have reached the stage at which all the good intentions, talks, targets and policy frameworks, now need to be plotted for implementation – with required expenditures confirmed and budgeted for.
The scale of the task is seen in the numbers. For developing countries alone, $6 trillion is estimated to be needed annually to implement some, not even all, of the NDC and related measures. The number of NDCs, and their cost, are particularly burdensome in Africa.[1] Not only does the Global South experience the severest impacts of climate change, but due to the legacy of history it also has an inequitable share of financial resources to mitigate and adapt, to improve resilience, and to transition fast to greener solutions.
COP29 should not be considered in a vacuum. In mid-2025 the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development is happening in Spain, also under the auspices of the UN. Its agenda is more specifically focused around redesigning the global financial system to improve funding flows for the world’s developing regions.
So COP29, and the Fourth International Conference on Financing for Development next year, are vital, in so many ways. Simply put, it’s time to push the world’s developing countries to pay for their pollution in the past, the scale of which is not diminishing, and which has led the entire world to this point of climate crisis.
Let’s shift perspective: The link to Africa’s mining industry.
Africa is integral to the achievement of net-zero, because the continent has many of these raw materials necessary to transition to renewable sources of energy and a green economy. Apart from copper, by far the optimal electricity conductor, the continent has known, largely untapped reserves of the group of 17 rare earth elements, and critical minerals like cobalt, lithium and nickel, without which all forms of renewables, including hydro-, solar- and wind-generated power, and related green technologies such as electric vehicles, cannot come to fruition. Global demand for these materials will surge by 400% over the next few years, and surge again in the decades ahead.
But, given that Africa has the raw commodities and inputs to power the technologies needed for more sustainable methods of global production and commerce, its citizens can contribute both to improving the efficiency of mining operations and increasing the volume of extractions, as well as to regearing the subsequent parts of the overall value chain.
How to do this? Painting a picture of Africa’s opportunity.
Let’s think more specifically about the end-goal for all developing countries, but using Zambia as an illustration because – having political stability and a business-friendly president whose stated objectives include boosting the economy – it would be an appropriate test-bed for the template of the interlinked ideas below.
Zambia must improve its climate resilience as well as fulfil its NDC commitments towards the global net-zero goal. It must diversify the economy. And grow it, too, one thrust towards this being President Hichilema’s mining expansion target of 3m tonnes of copper production by the early-2030s. It needs to create employment; equally its citizens need quality of life improvements – and, in this context, the current power shortage is a disaster (one directly attributable to the specific climate agenda of COP29).
These positive changes can be ushered in by means of a government vision for a long-term, business-friendly regulatory environment. But it needs to go further. The vision can be supplemented with outlined, workable strategies and plans that capitalise on the opportunity for assistance represented by COP29 and other forthcoming summits to propose blended solutions that address all of these issues.
Beneficiation is key. Zambia must strategise how to add value to its mining production. Currently, 69% of copper exports are raw. If refined exports are included, foreign exchange earnings from non-beneficiated copper account for 90% of all of the country’s mining of the metal. (Roughly the same proportion applies to all Zambia’s other mined metals and minerals.)
To create value, and aim to gear for multiple objectives, plants must be set up to process the extractions; that’s the easier, first step. Next, factories must be built very close to the major copper mines to manufacture copper-based products for the global renewable energy market and ecosystem, including solar panels, electric vehicle batteries and other energy storage systems, and power cables. Tax and financial incentives – via, perhaps, COP29 negotiations – can boost attractiveness for companies from all over the world to invest in these factories. Consider, for example, the drawcard of tax-free economic zones in the provinces where these manufacturing hubs are set up.
Manufacturers can also be incentivised through long-term licenses. The flip side is that they should be mandated to implement local technology transfer, invest in training, and guarantee a proportion of all of these renewable energy products at discounted prices for the local market – Zambia’s homes and small- to medium-sized enterprises initially, then scaling for large industries – to ease Zambia’s power generation problem.
A tenet within these examples of public-private partnership programmes is that government should forge the policy and facilitate. But it should not be an implementor. If COP29 settles on funding being channeled between and intra- governments, this will lead to wastage and inefficiencies. Importantly, too, Zambia must not incur further national indebtedness through bodies such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or the World Bank.
Win-win: Positives, all round, for Zambia’s mines.
Would the mines increase output to feed the local factories rather than export? Mining companies can be incentivised to increase output. Being able to sell bulk copper outputs immediately to a neighbouring renewables industry factory is surely one very practical spur, especially if it was parallelled by a government-backed, guaranteed floor price, underwritten by special bonds or a new financial product involving capital providers such as the Green Climate Fund or other private impact investors. A further idea to catalyse mining companies’ expansion of operations is light-touch legislation encouraging mining companies to dual-list locally on the LuSE, the Lusaka Stock Exchange, to tap into capital sources from, for example, the country’s large pension funds. This would also serve to broaden and diversify the LuSE, in and of itself encouraging further foreign – and local – investment.
Mining has consistently been a major contributor to Zambia’s GDP. Its current, 2023 contribution is 13.7%, an increase on 2022’s 12.9%, and Q1 2024 edged up further, to 15.6%.[2] But, already a central player in the nation’s economy, mining sector stakeholders surely see the bigger opportunity in scenarios that can generate mutual gains: and extraction incentives, more output at better prices, wider employment in a fast-growing economy edging towards middle-income classification.
What should Zambia’s strategy be at COP29? Simply, it should be informed by the country’s ability to contribute, fast, to the world going green.
The initiatives outlined above represent a workable thrust in this regard. They say to COP29 participants and decision-makers, to the impact investing community, to the mining industry, “Invest in Zambia’s core extractive industry, in new manufacturing sectors for beneficiation, in its economy, in its people. Doing so will achieve Zambia’s NDC, and contribute to the net-zero targets across Africa. And it will reap financial returns for all stakeholders.”