Danilo Desiderio
July 2nd, 2026
Africa’s new trend of green regionalism
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Africa’s new trend of green regionalism
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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Climate change is accelerating the reconfiguration of African regionalism beyond its trade and market oriented core into a multi-layered system structured around shared ecological vulnerability, writes Danilo Desiderio
Climate change is forcing a profound transformation in African regionalism. Initially designed as a linear project of market integration—focused on tariffs, liberalisation, and transport connectivity—regionalism is being reshaped by climate shocks. Cross-border droughts, floods, and climate-induced displacement are exposing the limits of purely market-centred coordination. In response, African Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and continental institutions are expanding their mandates into the governance of collective resilience. This emerging “green regionalism” integrates climate and resource constraints directly into economic coordination, making environmental risk management inseparable from regional integration.
At the continental level, the African Union (AU) is forging an evolving green integration architecture. Agenda 2063 frames sustainability as a long-term development goal, while the AU Climate Change and Resilient Development Strategy 2022-2032 and the African Green Stimulus Programme seek to align climate risk management with industrial policy and structural transformation. Complementing these initiatives, the Africa Action Plan on Carbon Markets strengthens institutional capacity to build transparent carbon trading frameworks with equitable benefit-sharing. Simultaneously, the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is extending its regulatory reach into green industrialisation, low-carbon production, and resilient supply chains: a trajectory anchored in the sustainability principles of the AfCFTA Protocol on Investment.
Diverging vocabularies of green regionalism
At the sub-continental level, this green transformation unfolds through distinct regional grammars across the eight African Union recognised RECs:
East African Community (EAC): green regionalism takes a corridor-based form. Guided by the EAC Vision 2050, energy, ICT, and logistics systems are integrated within low-emission development corridors, using infrastructure as the entry point for both adaptation and industrial transformation
Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD): regionalism is explicitly climate-embedded. Recurrent ecological shocks in the region shape pastoral mobility and food security, serving as the core substance of cooperation among its member states
Southern African Development Community (SADC): resilience is institutionalised through rule-based environmental governance, particularly in transboundary water systems (in river basins like the Zambezi, Limpopo, and Okavango), alongside broader frameworks for biodiversity, land degradation, and disaster risk reduction
Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS): regionalism is increasingly driven by energy infrastructure coordination, with the West African Power Pool serving as the central architecture for regional electricity exchange. ECOWAS thus illustrates an energy-centered form of infrastructural regionalism, where regional electricity integration strengthens interdependence and becomes a driver of institutional coordination among member States
Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA): sustainability principles are mainstreamed across trade and productive integration, exemplified by the Regional Association of Energy Regulators for Eastern and Southern Africa (RAERESA) energy roadmap, which aims to strengthen regional electricity market integration through cross-border power trade, regulatory harmonisation, and renewable energy deployment
Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS): Grounded environmentally by the Congo Basin, ECCAS treats environmental management and biodiversity conservation as a structural, foundational pillar of its integration model of integration
Arab Maghreb Union (AMU): “Green” cooperation initiatives remain mainly centred around shared water scarcity challenges, particularly through wastewater reuse and technical cooperation initiatives, as part of efforts to establish a “Maghreb Pole of Excellence”
Community of Sahel-Saharan States (CEN-SAD): Its mandate includes environmental and sustainable development priorities—especially desertification control, land degradation, food security, and climate adaptation—but remains largely programmatic rather than operational due to institutional constraints
The veto player problem and the data sovereignty issue
The shift toward resilience governance does face a potential veto bottleneck. Africa’s most powerful economies are also its most carbon-intensive. Countries such as Nigeria, Angola, and South Africa sit at the core of regional economic systems, meaning that any low-carbon transition at the regional level is contingent on their agreement and can stall in its absence. Green regionalism necessarily intersects with industrial policy trajectories, energy security concerns, and fiscal stability. As a result, the feasibility of this transition depends on whether the AU and RECs can function as effective bridging institutions. This involves managing asymmetries, sequencing reforms and integrating carbon-intensive economies into emerging green value chains, without destabilising the developmental foundations of these states.
This transformation raises a second, less visible constraint: data sovereignty. Governing climate vulnerability and green transition pathways requires control over the production and interpretation of climate data. Without autonomous African climate monitoring systems, “green standards” and vulnerability metrics risk being defined externally, shaping policy priorities in ways that may not fully reflect African developmental realities
Africa’s regionalism is undergoing a historic structural inversion, shifting from a system designed to facilitate market exchange to one organised around the governance and productive transformation of stressed ecological systems. Yet, this emerging green regionalism cannot succeed as a purely defensive response to vulnerability; its viability depends on whether Africa’s immense ecological endowments can be embedded into pathways of domestic industrialisation and value creation. That, in turn, requires the AU and RECs to evolve from regulatory coordinators into engines of strategic capital formation capable of mobilising blended finance and retaining financial flows within African economies. Without this financial anchoring, ecological assets cannot be converted into developmental capacity, leaving Africa’s green architecture as an aspirational blueprint without economic gravity.
About the author
Danilo Desiderio
Danilo Desiderio is a trade and development advisor with extensive experience in African economic integration, regional trade policy, and customs law. He has consulted for the African Union, UNECA, EU, African Development Bank, and other international organisations. He is a Senior Customs and Trade Specialist at the World Bank and a Senior Associate at the Horn Economic and Social Policy Institute
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