About the Tracker
Since the announcement of the China–Africa Climate Declaration at the 8th FOCAC in November 2021, efforts to systematically document Chinese climate-related projects in Africa have accelerated significantly. The China–Africa Climate Action Tracker was developed to address persistent visibility gaps by combining official disclosures, institutional announcements, and cross-source monitoring into a structured and continuously maintained database.This page is designed as a living data product. The framework remains stable over time, while figures, charts, and highlights are updated in each release cycle.
Current Update Snapshot (2022–H1 2026)
The current database records 246 climate actions across 50 African countries, with an estimated ~49 GW renewable energy pipeline. Multilateral finance accounts for 41% of tracked activity, and 17 critical minerals projects are now included under a dedicated category introduced in 2025. These trends suggest that China–Africa climate cooperation is expanding in both scale and strategic depth.
Momentum Trend
Momentum after FOCAC 9 remains strong, with 91 new projects added over the last 18 months. The project timeline shows a clear quarterly peak in Q2 2023, a visible acceleration in Q3 2024 ahead of summit milestones, and a particularly strong implementation wave in Q1–Q2 2025. This pattern suggests that high-level commitments are continuing to translate into project pipelines and concrete activity.
Geographic Footprint
The footprint is continent-wide, but project concentration remains notable. Southern Africa leads with 81 projects, Central Africa follows with 28 projects shaped strongly by minerals-energy linkages, and North Africa is driven by large-scale renewable and industrial pipelines. At the same time, a relatively small group of countries accounts for a significant share of all tracked actions, highlighting both depth and uneven distribution in implementation.
Sector Evolution: Renewables + Diversification
Although the relative share of renewable energy in the overall portfolio declined from 65.8% to 35.2% as new sectors expanded, RE remains the single largest cooperation domain and the core investment anchor of the tracker, with an estimated pipeline of around 49 GW. From an investment perspective, this reflects a transition from a predominantly EPC-led model toward deeper capital participation, where developers and financiers are increasingly positioning along the full RE value chain—generation assets, transmission links, and enabling infrastructure—rather than treating projects as one-off construction contracts.
The relative share of renewable energy has declined from 65.8% to 35.2% as climate-friendly infrastructure rose from 19.4% to 24.2%, clean technology increased from 11.0% to 17.6%, and critical minerals reached 18.7% under the dedicated tracking framework introduced in 2025. Within critical minerals, lithium is most prominent, followed by rare earths and graphite, with major activity concentrations in DRC, Mali, and Tanzania.
Stakeholder Landscape
State-owned enterprises remain central in project execution, while private and technology firms are becoming more visible across clean technology, manufacturing, and services segments. At the same time, the financing structure is evolving, with multilateral channels playing a larger role alongside direct investment flows. This changing actor landscape points to a more plural and networked cooperation architecture than in earlier project cycles.
Data Scope and Limitations
The tracker captures project volume, sector mix, actor participation, and geographic spread with increasing granularity. However, users should note that implementation status varies, announced capacity does not always translate directly into commissioned outcomes, and adaptation-focused cooperation remains less visible in current records.
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