When the Green Transition Redraws Economic Power: Africa’s Race to Build the Green Economy

For decades, trade agreements were primarily about opening markets, reducing tariffs, facilitating cross-border commerce and establishing preferential access. That architecture is now changing. Trade agreements are increasingly becoming instruments for managing energy security, critical minerals, supply-chain resilience, renewable energy, industrial decarbonisation and climate policy. The new Trade & Climate Tracker developed by the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) captures this shift. Its analysis of 71 trade and economic agreements signed between January 2025 and June 2026, including 10 involving African countries, shows how rapidly trade, climate and economic security are converging. Of the 46 agreements for which texts were publicly available, 70% contained energy provisions, 59% broader climate provisions and 54% provisions on critical minerals. Renewable energy featured in 37%, while 17% addressed heavy-industry decarbonisation or circularity.

This is not simply the greening of trade policy. It is the emergence of a new economic architecture in which trade, investment, industrial policy, energy and strategic supply chains are increasingly designed as parts of the same system. Critical minerals are becoming strategic assets; renewable energy a source of industrial competitiveness; and trade agreements instruments for securing both markets and geopolitical resilience.

This transformation gives new strategic meaning to Africa’s emerging green regionalism. As we argued in this article published on the London School of Economics (SLE) blog, green regionalism should not be reduced to environmental cooperation. Its deeper potential lies in using the green transition to build a new geography of African production and integration.

Africa has what the emerging green economy needs: critical minerals, vast renewable-energy potential and significant opportunities for industrialisation. But possessing resources is not the same as capturing value. The central question is whether Africa will merely supply the green economy or build the regional systems capable of processing, transforming and trading its resources at higher value.

The distinction is fundamental. There is a difference between being integrated into a supply chain and being positioned to capture value within it. The first generates exports; the second builds capabilities.

For Africa, the choice is stark. If critical minerals leave the continent largely unprocessed, the green transition risks reproducing the old commodity model under a new, greener label. But if regional integration connects mineral resources to renewable energy, processing, manufacturing, technology and logistics, those same resources could underpin a new industrial geography.

This is where green regionalism becomes a practical strategy for integration. A mineral deposit in one country, renewable electricity in another, processing capacity elsewhere, and a cross-border transport corridor linking them to markets can form a single regional value chain. Integration then emerges not simply from negotiating rules, but from connecting productive systems. This suggests a different logic of African integration: not integration first and projects later, but integration through projects. The AfCFTA can provide the continental framework, while regional economic communities and cross-border initiatives provide the operational scale at which green value chains can actually function. Energy systems, critical-mineral processing, green industrial clusters and sustainable corridors could become the connective tissue of a more economically integrated continent.

The challenge is to ensure that Africa does not measure success by the volume of minerals extracted, the number of investment agreements signed or the amount of capital attracted, but by the capabilities that remain after investment arrives and resources leave the ground. Rules of origin, infrastructure, energy costs, technology transfer, local content, investment regimes and the movement of intermediate goods are therefore not technical details. They determine whether green regionalism produces value capture or merely resource extraction.

The IISD tracker reveals where the global economy is heading: trade agreements are increasingly being used to secure strategic resources, resilient supply chains and green industrial capabilities. Africa's response cannot be limited to negotiating access to the systems others are building. It must use regional integration to build systems of its own.

The question, then, is no longer whether trade and climate policy are converging. They already are. The real question is no longer whether Africa will be integrated into the green economy. It is whether Africa will integrate itself deeply enough to build one.

That distinction could define the continent’s economic position for decades to come. The green transition will not merely redraw the map of energy; it will redraw the geography of global economic power. Africa possesses many of the resources needed to shape that new geography. But resources alone do not create power. Power comes from connecting resources to energy, infrastructure, technology, finance, industry and markets: and, above all, from capturing value across those connections. Africa’s green regionalism will therefore succeed not when the world simply needs more of what Africa has, but when Africa has built the regional systems that determine what the world can do with it.

The future of Africa’s green economy will not be decided by what lies beneath its soil, but by what African nations will be able to build above it.