Session Planned at the 2nd Africa Climate Summit on Closing Africa’s Climate Resilience Gap: Why AI and Data Governance Must Be a Policy Priority

Africa remains on the frontline of the climate crisis—experiencing accelerating droughts, floods, heatwaves, shifting rainfall patterns, and coastal degradation—despite contributing less than 4% of global emissions. These shocks are reversing development gains and placing immense pressure on food systems, public health, infrastructure, and water security. The consequences are especially severe for climate-sensitive sectors such as water, agriculture, energy, transport and disaster risk management, where vulnerabilities are deepening due to limited adaptive capacity and under-resourced response systems.

While locally driven, context-specific adaptation is vital, many African countries lack access to the technological tools and systems required to adapt effectively and at scale. Across the Global South, however, a wide array of cost-effective, proven technologies is emerging—from Earth Observation (EO) systems and open-source climate data platforms to Artificial Intelligence (AI) for early warning systems, precision agriculture, grid optimisation, and resilient infrastructure planning. These innovations hold enormous promise for strengthening resilient agriculture, clean energy systems, and climate risk management, especially when tailored and scaled in African contexts.

But there are challenges. The most daunting one is perhaps the lack of data. Most African countries lack standardised, high-resolution, and longitudinal climate, agriculture, energy, and social indicator data. Lack of data is such that AI models cannot be trained and tested well. Where data does exist, they are siloed between institutions and incompatible since interoperability standards do not exist. Socio-economic data are the weakest of all, stifling the endeavour to produce inclusive and equitable AI tools that consider local resilience and vulnerability.

Development is also limited by the digital divide. Despite rising mobile phone penetration, vast tracts of rural Africa are not covered by consistent internet reach and low-cost computing infrastructure. These lacunas prevent real-time data access and constrain the AI-dependent service space. Additionally, compute resources such as GPUs and cloud facilities to train sophisticated AI models remain costly and scarce on the continent. Resilience of the AI infrastructure itself needs to be taken into consideration since climate risks jeopardise connectivity and data centre operations.

Human capital shortage is yet another massive obstacle. Even though there is a growing number of young African innovators, there is a critical shortage of educated AI practitioners, particularly for highly specialised fields like AI ethics, data science, and software engineering. Brain drain also reduces the pool of local experts available. At the same time, low digital literacy among smallholder farmers, community leaders, and even government officials will stunt the adoption and effective utilisation of AI tools.

In the realm of governance, Africa's AI regulation is in disarray. While the AU Continental AI Strategy offers a crucial road map, there is national implementation that ranges from zero to spotty, and most national legal regimes do not have provisions for creating ethical AI, safeguarding data, or international data sharing. In pursuit of ensuring fairness, transparency, and accountability in AI systems, particularly those that make predictions regarding risk or distribute resources, funded institutions, ethics review panels, and participatory forms of governance must design AI systems.

This UNECA session, scheduled for 9 September 2025, aligns with the 2nd Africa Climate Summit (ACS2)’s Nature-Tech and Resilience Tracks and will explore how African countries can collaborate with their peers in the Global South to advance Earth Intelligence, materials innovation, and digital technologies for climate adaptation. It aims to strengthen institutional capacity, bridge the technology divide, and build actionable coalitions for transformative South-South cooperation, particularly in resilient agriculture, sustainable energy, and risk management systems. It will be a moderated panel (4–5 speakers), followed by Q&A/audience engagement.

The Second Africa Climate Summit (ACS2) will be held under the theme “Accelerating Global Climate Solutions: Financing for Africa’s Resilient and Green Development”, the summit will take place from September 8–10, 2025, with pre-summit activities scheduled for September 5–7, 2025, at the Addis International Convention Center (AICC) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

Read the full concept and background notes to this side event titled: 'Collaborative Solutions: Leveraging AI for Resilient  Agriculture, Energy, and Risk Systems in Africa' from here: https://www.uneca.org/eca-events/Side_events