Land degradation in Burkina Faso. The country’s forests are under pressure from the expansion of farming areas. Courtesy: Burkina Faso Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development

By Brahima Ouédraogo
OUAGADOUGOU , Jul 20 2013 (IPS)

Burkina Faso has just received a grant of 30 million dollars from the Forest Investment Programme to help protect the country’s forests and reduce greenhouse gas emissions associated with deforestation.

Burkina’s forests are under pressure from the expansion of farming areas and the over-exploitation of firewood and other non-timber forest products. These include harvesting of immature fruit, extensive livestock grazing, bush fires, and – in certain regions – by gold mining, according to Luc Conditamdé, head of Tree Aid, an NGO based in Burkina Faso and Niger.

“Planting (new trees) is no longer as important as properly managing state and communal forests. The government needs to get communities to take more responsibility as forest management is decentralised,” Conditamdé tells IPS.

Improving governance and management of forests is one of the key objectives of the FIP, a programme in the framework of the Climate Investment Funds (CIF) implemented by the world’s multilateral development banks.

Eight pilot countries were selected for the FIP, including the three African countries Burkina Faso, Ghana and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Each has been chosen for their potential to significantly reduce emissions from deforestation; conserve, manage or enhance carbon stocks; and incorporate climate finance into their policy frameworks and development activities.

A semi-arid country in the West African Sahel might seem a surprising choice, but Burkina Faso met many of the required criteria, says Mafalda Duarte, CIF coordinator and chief climate change specialist at the African Development Bank.

“Burkina Faso is the only country selected that has a relatively ‘low’ forest cover and a relatively ‘low’ rate of deforestation, which may be interpreted as a low potential for REDD+ (reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation).

“Nevertheless, its semi-arid ecosystem makes it a good site to test the relevance and the operationalisation of REDD+ in that kind of ecosystems, which are widely spread worldwide,” she tells IPS. “In addition, Burkina has quite a long experience in participative management of forests.”

FIP has four objectives, including facilitating transformational change in forest policy and practice in developing countries; and piloting replicable models to improve understanding of how policy, forest-related investment, sustainable management and long-term emissions reductions interact.

“The backbone of this programme is the involvement of local communities, who have to be regularly consulted,” Samuel Yéyé, the Burkina Faso co-ordinator for FIP/REDD tells IPS.

Burkina’s FIP programme will work in four regions of the country, each representing a different ecosystem. In addition to reducing emissions and enhancing stocks of carbon-storing forests, it is expected to have significant benefits in terms of poverty reduction, preservation of biodiversity and adaptation to climate change.

According to Yéyé, preliminary studies have already been carried out on the preservation of tree cover in these regions, their capacity to sequester carbon, and into ways to help generate income for locals through the use of non-wood products.

“Communities must make their contribution to forest conservation, and we must create new economic activities so that people do not one day revert to destroying the forests as a means of earning an income,” Yéyé emphasises.

Tree Aid’s Conditamdé says one of the keys to improved preservation and management of Burkina’s forests lies in transferring skills, responsibilities and resources to local authorities.

“Article 77 of the Code Général des Collectivités Territoriales dealing with transfer of responsibilities for the environment and management of natural resources has not been implemented. This causes problems in the management of forest resources at the level of the commune, and contributes to local authorities taking only limited responsibility in managing forests,” he tells IPS.

He also cites challenges linked to poor coordination between various bodies, as well as a lack clarity over the laws and regulations that formally govern land ownership. “These are often poorly understood by most people, for example the process of registration for forests. This situation complicates the handling of management of communal and community forests.”

But Conditamdé sees promising signs that the FIP programme will help.

“Putting transparent and equitable mechanisms in place to allow different actors to participate in formulating policy and implementing activities will help to address (these problems),” he says.

According to the implementation plan for Burkina’s FIP grant, the project will reduce CO2 emissions linked to deforestation and land degradation in Burkina Faso by around 30 to 70 million tonnes over a period of 10 years.

Rasmane Ouédraogo, coordinator for the national Poverty-Environment Initiative, says forests are critical to livelihoods in Burkina Faso, where 80 percent of the population depends on natural resources.

The authorities are expecting that the economic benefits of reduced soil degradation and better protection due to the FIP grant will be worth an estimated at 1.56 billion dollars over the project’s life.

“We had to convince the politicians, particularly those in charge of the economy and finance, that the environment contributes significantly to the national economy.  The contribution rose from three percent of GDP to more than 6.48 percent between 2002 and 2008,” Ouédraogo says.

An economic evaluation conducted in 2009 by the Ministry of Agriculture, Water and Fisheries showed that investments of this nature could lead to an increase in revenue for farmers ranging from 25 to 40 percent.

Developed countries must support more effective mitigation in all countries where emissions are either high or growing. Credit: Cam McGrath/IPS

By Smita Nakhooda
BONN, Germany, Jun 10 2013 (IPS)

Developed countries report that they delivered more than 33 billion dollars in Fast Start Finance (known as FSF), beyond the pledges they made at COP 15 in Copenhagen in 2009. Recent analysis suggests that the funding delivered may have exceeded 38 billion dollars.  But that is not the whole story.

The story behind the headline lies in how this money has been allocated. What has it supported, and how much of it represents new funding to support the additional challenges that climate change poses for development?

My colleagues at ODI in the United Kingdom, the World Resources Institute (WRI) in the United States, the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES) in Japan, Germanwatch in Germany and Cicero in Norway have analysed our countries’ FSF contributions to try and answer these questions. These countries’ climate finance contributions are among the largest.

In Copenhagen, four years ago, these and other developed countries promised to deliver 30 billion dollars from 2010 to 2012 as Fast Start Finance. This would kick-start the delivery of 100 billion dollars per year by 2020. A substantial share of this finance may flow through the Green Climate Fund, a new mechanism to deliver money to developing countries so they can mitigate and adapt to climate change. Now, what does all this mean in reality?

Climate finance contributions have increased

Our first message is a positive one: finance for climate-related activities in developing countries has increased significantly during the FSF period, despite unprecedented economic difficulties and austerity measures in developed countries brought on by the 2008 financial crisis. Indeed, this trend applies to all of the countries we reviewed. The UK, for example, appears to have increased its climate finance four-fold relative to environment-related spending before the FSF period.

A challenge, however, is that countries counted very different forms of finance, resulting in major differences between the scale and objectives of different contributions.

A large share of Germany’s 1.6-billion-dollar FSF contribution is directed through its International Climate Initiative, which is indirectly financed through revenues from emission trading. With the exception of its 615-million-dollar contribution to the Climate Investment Fund, Germany counts only grants towards its FSF. By contrast, Japan and the United States include as FSF a large share of export credit and development finance for low-carbon infrastructure. In Japan’s case, some efficient fossil fuel options are also counted. Japan has also reported on leveraged private finance in its total.

Many countries also seek FSF “credit” for projects and programmes that they were already supporting prior to the FSF period.

For instance, the United States counts its contribution to the Montreal Protocol Fund, which it has been supporting since the early 1990s, as FSF. A significant share of Japanese FSF was pledged prior to 2010 through initiatives such as the Cool Earth Partnership. All five countries count contributions to the Climate Investment Funds (CIFs) since 2010, although countries pledged to fund the CIFs at a cumulative level of at least 6.1 billion dollars in 2008.

These pledges were made in the context of efforts to scale up climate related finance in the lead up to Copenhagen. But while these are important programmes, for which sustained support is essential, the pledges are not technically “new” during the FSF period.

Of the five countries we studied, only Norway has met the international commitment to deliver 0.7 percent of its gross national income (GNI) as official development assistance (ODA) and can claim that its contribution was additional by this standard during the FSF period (although it has ramped up its domestic ODA commitment to one percent of GNI). Only Germany and Norway have clearly spelled out how they define “new and additional” in their self-reporting on climate finance.

Using climate finance effectively

There has been a strong focus on funding activities that can help developing countries reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This includes financing clean electricity from renewable energy, the use of more efficient technologies, and better public transport systems.

Such programmes can play a vital role in supporting countries to meet their basic infrastructure and energy needs without the emissions. Such finance is essential.

Emissions in many rapidly growing developing countries are rising fast. While they may bear less historical responsibility for climate change, today some of the largest emitters in the world are developing countries. There are abundant opportunities to take more climate compatible approaches to development – but they often pose additional costs or risks. International public finance can help countries seize such opportunities.

But the truth is that we are already feeling the impacts of climate change. These impacts will be particularly severe in poor countries. And global efforts to address climate change so far have been inadequate.

This reinforces the imperative to support more effective mitigation in all countries where emissions are either high or growing. But it also strengthens the case to scale up adaptation finance.

During the FSF period countries committed to scale up adaptation finance. Adaptation finance would focus on the developing countries that are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, including Least Developed Countries (LDCs), Small Island Developing States (SIDS), and African countries. About 12 percent of the total FSF contribution of the five countries we studied supported adaptation, with the share ranging from about seven percent in Norway to about 35 percent in the UK and Germany.

In practice, of course, adaptation and mitigation activities may be quite interlinked. Norway, for example, has prioritised efforts to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation, particularly in tropical forests, which also have adaptation benefits.

Future public support for climate action, however, is highly uncertain. This is a substantial challenge. There is an urgent need for greater clarity on the level of public finance that developing countries can expect from the international community.

The FSF experience reinforces the importance of scaling up finance in order to meet the ever more urgent challenges of climate change. This will require political commitment and leadership at the national level, and enhanced global cooperation.

*This commentary is based on a joint analysis by Smita Nakhooda (ODI), and Taryn Fransen of the World Resources Institute (WRI), reflecting on the FSF experience on the occasion of the 38th sessions of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation and the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, as well as the second part of the second session of the Ad Hoc Working Group on the Durban Platform for Enhanced Action, taking place from Jun. 3-14, 2013, in Bonn, Germany.

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