Nexus25 Policy Conference: EU-Africa Relations in Transition
Rome, 29 October 2024
The Nexus25 project, a transatlantic effort led by the Istituto Affari Internazionali and Center for Climate and Security, hosted its first annual conference in Rome on October 29th, 2024. This invite-only conference, organized in collaboration with The European Think Tanks Group, centered on enhancing EU-African partnerships from the lens of mitigation, adaptation, and the energy transition.
At the 2023 Africa Climate Summit, leaders produced the “African Leaders’ Nairobi Declaration on climate change and call to action,” which is now the basis for the continent’s common position on global climate change negotiations. The Nairobi Declaration stresses the importance of climate-positive growth, green industrialisation, and local value creation while recognizing the cascading effects of climate change across sectors and borders. We believe that the EU has the instruments, from its regulatory power to its flows of climate finance, to be a more effective partner of the African continent in these efforts. Ahead of critical climate milestones this fall, this conference served as a critical opportunity to assess the successes and failures of the EU-Africa relationship, covering: opportunities and roadblocks to regional collaboration in the green transition; EU/African cooperation on mitigation policies and future-proof energy supply chains; and sustainable agri-food systems across the EU and Africa.
Attendees included representatives from the European Union and its member states, African Union and its member states, key UN bodies, and other civil society organizations. The public event in the morning was followed by a series of private discussions in the afternoon.
This discussion is part of a series of Nexus25 meetings with a diverse range of bilateral and multilateral stakeholders throughout 2024. Nexus25 is funded by Stiftung Mercator, one of the largest private foundations in Germany. Future Nexus25 discussions will be held in Germany and the United States in early 2025.
In this document, some takeaways and policy recommendations from these discussions:
