Egypt’s Minister of Environment, Yasmine Fouad, and the CEO of the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD) Nardos Bekele, signed an agreement to establish and host the African Centre of Excellence for Resilience and Adaptation to the Impacts of Climate Change.
The agreement was signed at the Egyptian pavilion on the sidelines of the 28th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP28), which is taking place in the UAE.
Fouad said that the agreement was the result of 18 months of hard work by the team and that Egypt would spare no effort to launch the centre as soon as possible and to work closely with the NEPAD to ensure that the African continent was given priority in terms of adaptation and resilience starting from 2024.
She added that there would be cooperation with various partners to ensure the sustainability of funding sources, capacity building, technology transfer, and learning from the experiences of the communities most affected by climate change, and how to replicate and build on them.
The centre was proposed by Egypt during its presidency of the African Union as an initiative to strengthen African efforts in adaptation.