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NAIROBI, Kenya (AP) -- Climate change is "relentlessly eating away" at Africa's economic progress and it's time to have a global conversation about a carbon tax on polluters, Kenya's president declared Tuesday as the first Africa Climate Summit got underway.
"Those who produce the garbage refuse to pay their bills," President William Ruto, a host of the summit, said to an audience that included senior officials from China, the United States and the European Union -- some of the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases.
The rapidly growing African continent of more than 1.3 billion people is losing 5% to 15% of its gross domestic product growth every year to the widespread impacts of climate change, according to Ruto. It's a source of deep frustration in the resource-rich region that contributes by far the least to global warming.
He and other leaders urged reforms to the global financial structures that have left African nations paying about five times more to borrow money than others, worsening the debt crisis for many. Africa has more than 30 of the world's most indebted countries, Kenya's Cabinet secretary for the environment, Soipan Tuya, said.
The U.S. government's climate envoy, John Kerry, acknowledged the "acute, unfair debt." He also said 17 of the world's 20 countries most impacted by climate change are in Africa -- while the world's 20 richest nations, including his own, produce 80% of the world's carbon emissions that are driving climate change.
Asked about the Kenyan president's call for a carbon tax discussion, Kerry said President Joe Biden has "not yet embraced any particular carbon pricing mechanism."
Ruto said Africa's 54 countries "must go green fast before industrializing and not vice versa, unlike (richer nations) had the luxury to do." Transforming Africa's economy on a green trajectory "is the most feasible, just and efficient way to attain a net-zero world by 2050," he said.