ENVIRONMENT: Fund for Developing Nations Short-Changed – Activist

By Marty Logan Reprint | | Print |

Marty Logan

MONTREAL, Aug 9 2002 (IPS) - The fact that the pot of money the Global Environment Facility (GEF) uses to help developing countries protect the environment was sweetened by almost three billion dollars may sound like good news, but it is really a mere 10- percent raise to do a lot more work, says an activist studying the institution.

The GEF announced this week that 32 donor countries pledged 2.9 billion dollars during its third round of financing negotiations. The Facility emerged from the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro as a funding tool to help the nations of the developing South implement international environmental treaties.

But about a quarter of the announced money is not new, says Robin Round of the Canada-based Halifax Initiative, a coalition of groups working to reform the international financial system.

When unpaid commitments and money carried over from the previous phase is removed from the GEF pot, new pledges add up to 2.21 billion dollars, an increase of 210 million dollars over the last re-financing, says Round, co-author of a soon-to-be released analysis of the GEF’s first decade.

Meanwhile, the Facility must now fund nations’ efforts to implement a new treaty on organic pollutants and, likely, another one on desertification. Until recently the GEF funded four “focal areas”: biodiversity, climate change, international waters and ozone-depleting chemicals.

“What that effectively leaves for two brand-new, multilateral environmental agreements is about 105 million dollars each, over four years, which is absolutely outrageous,” says Round.

“Imagine 105 million dollars to phase out dioxins and furans around the world over the next four years. I don’t think you could even print up enough brochures about the POPS (persistent organic pollutants) convention for that amount.”

Round says donor countries were under “tremendous pressure” to come up with money in time for the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg later this month (Aug. 26-Sep.4).

But the announced funding “is a slap in the face to all the southern governments, which negotiated in good faith these agreements with the understanding that they would receive assistance from the North to implement their commitments under these conventions”, she adds.

In a press release, GEF chairman Mohamed T. El-Ashry said, “The level of replenishment is strong evidence of the participants’ commitment to the global environment and the GEF, and should contribute to the success of the World Summit.”

Donor countries include several developing nations, such as China, Cote d’Ivoire, India, Mexico and Pakistan.

No one from the GEF was available for comment on Friday.

Round says her research found that carving up responsibility for the Facility between the World Bank, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the U.N. Environmental Programme (UNEP) created massive problems.

“There’s been a huge internal competition between those agencies to get their hands on the money, and it’s led to overlap, duplication (and) a project cycle that is almost unmanageable in terms of countries trying to access resources.”

While acknowledging the GEF’s growing pains and complicated structure, another environmentalist is more positive about the organisation’s record.

“Clearly there’s a need to provide financial support for concrete projects to enable these developing countries to protect biodiversity, to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, to protect their waters (and) now to deal with problems of desertification and persistent organic pollutants,” says Jacob Scherr, director of international programmes for the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council.

“The GEF is the place that does that, and that’s a very important source of support for those kinds of activities,” he adds.

The Facility says it has provided 4.2 billion dollars in grants since 1991. On Friday, it announced a 30-million-dollar grant to help protect Brazil’s Amazon region.

Round also acknowledges that the GEF has achieved positive things. “There’s something called the Small Grants Programme, which channels resources under 50,000 dollars to small projects. A lot of what’s been done there is building local capacity, engaging grassroots communities in issues of climate change and biodiversity protection.”

“I think those are success stories — there are lots of them there”, says Round, but she adds that only 95 projects have been fully completed and only 41 evaluated. “In 10 years, that’s not good enough.”

Furthermore, the GEF should not be evaluated in isolation of trade, debt and other international influences, Round says.

“The debt load of the developing countries isn’t decreasing. And what does that lead to? Pressures for increased resource extraction, for commodities for the export market, which leads to environmental degradation.”

“Those kinds of pressures continue and are building and are weakening — at a global level — the ability to counteract environmental destruction. Until those issues are more comprehensively addressed, the GEF will remain a very small pot of money with a very big task.”