Egypt’s Minister of Environment and Ministerial Coordinator and Climate Envoy for COP27, Yasmine Fouad, participated in the launching ceremony of the first voluntary, Africa-wide carbon credit exchange to encourage and diversify investment in the continent’s green economy.
The ceremony was held Wednesday within the Finance Day in the Blue Zone of the Egyptian pavilion in the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27) in Sharm El-Sheikh.
Fouad stressed during the session that the voluntary carbon market is part of Egypt’s commitments to the Paris Agreement, explaining the role played by the Ministry of Environment in this field by providing support and oversight over the processes that are carried out to ensure transparency and credibility and working to provide information and data that enable identifying opportunities promising investment.
The minister added that the Ministry of Environment is working hard to overcome all the difficulties facing the climate work environment in Egypt, under the slogan “together for implementation” and within the framework of the national strategy for climate change, the plan for nationally determined contributions, the climate investment plan through the private sector.
Egypt’s efforts in this regard included also the submission to investment projects and the opening of a voluntary market exchange of carbon certificates, in order to address climate change and improve the lives of citizens, stressing that this proves Egypt’s interest in all issues and cooperation with everyone in order to achieve the principle together for implementation, which we hope to reach the conclusion of this conference.
The Minister of Environment explained that the carbon certificates trading market is one of the innovative non-traditional financing mechanisms such as grants, loans and private sector investments, which opens the way for African countries, where the trading of carbon certificates contributes to obtaining a financial reward that allows them to implement projects to address the negative effects of climate change.
