We are used to filing food security, sovereign debt and climate under three different headings, managed by three different ministries. The 2026 fertiliser shock has collapsed them into one. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz trapped roughly a third of the world’s seaborne fertiliser trade and drove urea prices up close to 80 percent — the highest since 2022 — and a record El Niño is now landing on top of it. Together they are hitting where it hurts most: the balance sheets of countries that can least absorb them. That pattern is global, but arguably nowhere is it sharper — or the opportunity to do something about it greater right now— than in Africa.

A fertiliser bill paid in scarce dollars drains reserves; thin reserves raise the cost of debt; debt service crowds out everything else. Sub-Saharan Africa imports around 90 percent of its fertiliser, so one bad season is all it takes to feel how tightly the three are bound. This is not an abstraction. It is smallholder families — many of them women, who grow most of the region’s food — deciding whether they can afford to plant.

The instinctive fix — building fertiliser capacity at home — is only half right. Domestic synthetic production still runs on imported gas, relocating the dependency rather than escaping it, as Brazil found after 2022. The durable answer is harder: inputs a country actually controls — biochar, compost, seaweed biostimulants, insect frass — made from Africa’s own biomass, in local currency, rebuilding soils rather than stripping them. The opportunity is real precisely because it is hard: young industries not yet price-competitive without deliberate support, the same industrial policy that once built solar.

That is where the deepest work sits. Debt-sustainability analysis and credit ratings capture the cost of a climate or price shock after it hits, not the investment that would have softened it. Substitute imported fertiliser with domestic inputs, and you cut the import bill, ease foreign-exchange demand, and rebuild the soil that underpins the next harvest — fiscal resilience that the machinery pricing sovereign debt does not yet register. With the Coalition of Finance Ministers, Systemiq and LSE, we are building the first country-level estimates of resilience savings, live in Uganda and expanding across the continent (and beyond)— pressing to have them recognised in debt frameworks and ratings, so a country investing in its own food security is rewarded with cheaper capital, not penalised for the vulnerability it is trying to reduce.

As sustainable-finance leaders gather from around the world, we do so in the early stages of a mounting food, debt and climate crisis — one fast becoming a perennial disruption rather than a passing shock and bearing down particularly hard on the African continent. Two levers can change the outcome: integrating nature-based resilience into how sovereign risk is assessed and priced, and directing capital into the green industries that reduce these dependencies. Neither is easy, and neither is anyone’s job by default, which is why they must be done together. A new African Bioeconomy Finance Hub with FSD-A and the African Natural Capital Alliance, and our resilience-adjusted sovereign-finance work with the Coalition are two concrete entry points to begin building on.

For the shock already upon us, much of the answer is now emergency and humanitarian response; that window has largely closed. The choice we still have is over the next one — whether it lands as another disaster or meets a continent that used this crisis to build its defences. That is an African-led opportunity, rooted in Africa’s own natural assets — and one the rest of the world has every reason to back as partners and investors in it.

– Author: Julie McCarthy, CEO, NatureFinance

– This contribution is brought to you by NatureFinance, a valued Founding Partner of Building Bridges.