The Kingdom of Eswatini is a landlocked country between South Africa and People’s Republic of Mozambique. The country faces numerous challenges such as poverty, chronic food insecurity, HIV/AIDS and climate-related disasters that include droughts, storms and floods and invasive plant and diseases. According to Eswatini's Third National Communication to the UNFCCC, between 1961 and 2010 there is an upward trend in mean annual temperature across the different parts of the country and a decrease in seasonal rainfall and an increase in frequencies of dry spells.
Saint Lucia is a Small Island Development State (SIDS), which is highly at risk from climate change, mainly due to its location along the North Atlantic hurricane corridor, its small surface area, geographic location and its economic reliance on tourism and agriculture, which are climate-sensitive factors. The country’s limited capacity to reconstruct and reactivate its economy after climate-related shocks renders it highly vulnerable. Because of its small geographic size and dependence on natural resources any extreme weather event can have national implications.
Vanuatu is a small island country in the Pacific which depends almost entirely on imported fossil fuel for its energy and transport needs. The continuous reliance on these fossil fuels is not only unsustainable for Vanuatu but goes against Vanuatu’s national climate change mitigation ambition as reflected in its Nationally Determined Contributions, its Climate Change and Disaster Risk Reduction Policy, its National Energy Roadmap and Vanuatu’s Sustainable Development Plan.
The technical assistance for direct use of geothermal energy in low to medium temperature geothermal systems was requested by six African countries in the Eastern Africa region. The countries lie within the Great East African Rift Valley (both at the eastern and western branches), a region that possesses a remarkable geothermal energy resource potential that can be used for power generation and direct use application.
Currently, there exist 20 coal-fired power plants in operation with a total capacity of nearly 14,500 MW, which generate about 15.7 million tons of coal slag per year, of which coal ash accounts for 75%. It is predicted that by the year 2020, there will be 43 factories, which will generate more than 30 million tons of coal slag per year. At present, there are no suitable solutions for this huge amount of slag.
