The launch of the 2025 Global Climate Action Yearbook in Belém, Brazil, marks a defining moment for global climate governance, outlining how non-state actors, from cities and regions to businesses and community groups, are playing a critical role in turning the goals of the Paris Agreement into tangible progress.
Published as countries submit new stages of their climate change plans ahead of COP30, the yearbook presents a clearer picture of who is acting, what progress has been made, where momentum is stalling, why tougher accountability is needed in the next decade, and how voluntary action is reshaping the climate trajectory across the region, including Africa.
This year’s edition describes the global situation in which climate action is expanding rapidly but unevenly. The NAZCA portal documents climate change efforts by non-Party parties and now records more than 43,000 stakeholders worldwide, up from 18,000 just five years ago, and includes more than 1,400 African organizations. They range from mid-sized municipalities seeking to ensure climate-resilient water systems to agribusinesses transitioning to lower-emission supply chains. The growing presence of African countries reflects both heightened awareness and urgent practical needs as they face worsening climate impacts while competing for limited adaptation and mitigation funding.
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The yearbook captures this duality through a set of new socio-economic and initiative-level indicators that track progress since 2015. Global renewable energy capacity has more than doubled over this period, and several utility consortiums are investing heavily in grid expansion, including in African markets where electrification remains incomplete.
But the same set of indicators reveals persistent structural gaps. Investment in electricity grids remains extremely low globally, and the shortage is most acute in regions with rapidly growing populations. The majority of sub-Saharan Africa’s 666 million people still lack access to electricity, and even as renewable energy capacity expands, inadequate transmission and distribution infrastructure limits its economic and social impact.
African governments will need to interpret these findings from a practical perspective. Without accelerating funding for grid stabilization, storage and distributed renewable systems, the continent risks being locked into an energy transition that is technically viable but operationally constrained.
For countries such as Kenya, Ghana and Malawi, where mini-grids and solar PV systems are already performing well, the Almanac’s warning about infrastructure bottlenecks is a signal that investments must focus not only on clean power generation, but also on the architectures that enable it.
The findings on land use and restoration provide a further encouraging example of African leadership. This yearbook highlights Restore Africa, a community-led, nature-based program that has restored 600,000 hectares in four countries, charting a path to reach 1.8 million hectares and support 1.5 million households.
The scale of this effort positions Africa as a major contributor to global recovery, but the contrast with worsening global deforestation trends highlights the challenge that nature-based solutions are growing but not fast enough to counter accelerating land degradation in some regions. The continent’s recovery efforts are therefore of global importance, especially as food security pressures increase and pastoral livelihoods face increasing climate stress.
Another area where Africa’s realities stand out is in adaptation finance. The yearbook reports that global climate finance has tripled from about $700 billion in 2015 to $1.9 trillion in 2023, but this jump masks a lack of adaptation-focused finance. Despite Africa’s cities and local governments being exposed to extreme weather, the proportion remains small.
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Flood-prone metropolitan centers such as Lagos, Dar es Salaam and Maputo continue to struggle with infrastructure deficiencies, while humanitarian and economic losses are mounting in drought-stricken regions. The paper’s emphasis on underfunding local adaptation is therefore not abstract. This reflects the real-life experience of local governments, which lack the fiscal autonomy to respond to climate change shocks, even with improved early warning systems.
Still, the yearbook points to new institutional channels that could change this imbalance. Initiatives like the African Urban Water Adaptation Platform and Fund represent early steps towards building coordinated city-level resilience programs.
Although the current number of members is modest, the model that brings together cities, financial institutions, and technology partners in a shared adaptive architecture could potentially address some of the systemic funding barriers faced by African municipalities as it scales up. In practice, this means coastal cities facing rising sea levels can access bulk financing for drainage redesign, wastewater improvements, and mangrove restoration, rather than relying on disjointed funding channels.
The yearbook shows that the gap between commitment and implementation is widening across sectors. Many cooperative efforts on climate change cite a lack of finance and productive capacity as their main constraints. This pattern reflects the African experience. From youth-led waste collection movements in West Africa to off-grid energy companies in the Sahel, innovation exists, but the pipeline of projects capable of absorbing large-scale capital remains slim.
This data suggests a clear set of operational needs, including expanded technical assistance to make projects bankable, de-risking tools for small and medium-sized enterprises, and blended financing structures that can transition pilot projects into commercially scalable programs.
For Africa, the Almanac is not just a repository of global progress, but a strategic resource. It provides indicators that can be incorporated into NDC revisions, national budget cycles, and local-level planning processes. The findings also strengthen African countries’ negotiating position at COP30, and the document’s transparency on fiscal gaps, infrastructure deficits, and the uneven distribution of resilience investments supports long-standing calls for a fairer financing framework.
A clear message emerges from this year’s report. The next decade will not be judged by the breadth of climate action, but by the extent to which those efforts reshape energy access, protect ecosystems, expand climate-resilient infrastructure, and protect livelihoods.
For African countries, that means translating the momentum captured in the NAZCA portal into tangible results, kilowatt-hours delivered to off-grid clinics, restored landscapes that support agriculture, and municipal systems equipped to withstand intensifying climate change. Yearbook provides measurement tools. Current implementation depends on political will, institutional coherence, and a sustained flow of funding to the continent’s front-line climate priorities.
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