Coastal communities in the Solomon Islands in the southwest Pacific Islands are already threatened by climate change with rising seas and stronger storm surges. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia, Jan 1 2016 (IPS)

Women leaders in the Pacific Islands have acclaimed the agreement on reducing global warming achieved at the United Nations (COP21) Climate Change conference in Paris as an unprecedented moment of world solidarity on an issue which has been marked to date by division between the developing and industrialized world. But for Pacific small island developing states, which name climate change as the single greatest threat to their survival, it will only be a success if inspirational words are followed by real action.

“It’s a huge step forward and I don’t think it would have been possible without the voices of indigenous Pacific Islanders banding together and demanding action and justice…. I am very optimistic about the future,” Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, climate activist and poet from the Republic of the Marshall Islands, who attended the historic meeting, told IPS.

Intense negotiations and compromise between the interests of 195 countries, plus the European Union, which make up the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the climate change convention, marked its 21st meeting in Paris last month.

Dame Meg Taylor, Secretary General of the regional Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat (PIFS), said that “while not all the issues identified by Pacific Island countries were included in the final outcome and agreement, there were substantive advances with recognition of the importance of pursuing efforts to limit temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the inclusion of loss and damage as a separate element in the agreement and simplified and scaled up access to climate change finance.”

Claire Anterea of the Kiribati Climate Action Network in the small Central Pacific atoll nation of around 110,000 people added that the outcome was “good, but not perfect,” highlighting that the new temperature goal and call to boost climate finance were particularly important.

The World Meteorological Organisation predicted this year will be the hottest on record with average global temperatures expected to reach 1 degree Celsius above the pre-industrial age. Meanwhile Pacific Island countries are bracing for further rising temperatures, sea levels, ocean acidification and coral bleaching this century. Maximum sea level rise in many island states could reach more than 0.6 metres, reports the Pacific Climate Change Science Program.

Due to rising seas in the Marshall Islands “a simple high tide results in waves flooding and crashing through sea walls built of cement and rocks and completely destroying homes. The salt from the flooding also destroys our crops and food,” Jetnil-Kijiner said..

In the best case scenario, Kiribati and Papua New Guinea could experience a temperature increase of 1.5 degrees Celsius, but under high emissions this might soar to 2.9 degrees Celsius by 2090.

Global warming could result in yields of sweet potato, a common staple crop, declining by more than 50 per cent in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands by 2050, estimates the Asian Development Bank. The burden of crop losses will fall on the shoulders of Pacific Islands’ women who are primarily responsible in communities for growing fresh produce, producing food and fetching water.

Pacific Islanders led a campaign in Paris this year to recognize a new temperature rise threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius. This is critical, they argued, to stem future climate shocks and mitigate forced displacement as islands become increasingly uninhabitable due to loss of food, water and land.

And in a sign of shifting views in the industrialized world, Pacific Islanders were joined in their campaigning on this issue by numerous developed and developing nations in a ‘Coalition of High Ambition’ which emerged during the second week of COP21. Solidarity was demonstrated by, amongst others, Mexico, Brazil, Norway, Germany, the European Union and United States.

The final Paris agreement which seeks to limit global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius and ‘pursue efforts’ to further reduce it by another 0.5 degree was a win for the coalition.

“1.5 degrees Celsius wasn’t even on the table before the conference began, so hearing it first announced that it even made it into the text made me cry with relief. That being said, the vague wording definitely has me worried and I know it’ll take a continued push from all of us to actually reach 1.5,” Jetnil-Kijiner said.

This will not decrease the immense challenges the region already faces in adapting to extreme weather, which cannot be met by small island economies without access to international climate finance. This year island leaders called for the international community to honour its pledge to raise 100 billion dollars per year by 2020 to fund adaptation in developing countries, an objective first conceived in Copenhagen in 2009. Assessments since then of how much has been raised vary, but the World Bank claimed in April there was a serious shortfall of 70 billion dollars.

Taylor believes “there is a positive outlook for climate financing post-2020 with Article 9 of the Paris Agreement identifying that, for Small Island Developing States, financing needs to be public and grant-based resources for adaptation.” There has been debate about whether finance mechanisms, such as the Green Climate Fund (GCF), should issue free grants or concessional loans.

Anterea emphasised that, to be effective, funding “needs to reach grassroots people through a simple processing method.”

Recognition of loss and damage caused by extreme weather and natural disasters in the final pact was also a milestone, the PIFS Secretary General added, even though it does not provide for vulnerable nations to claim liability or compensation from big polluters.

“The legal right of countries to test the liabilities of other Parties using other avenues has not been diminished by this decision,” she said.

But the greatest hope is being invested in the binding commitment by nations to set emission reduction targets and be subject to a process of long term monitoring and review, a move which would accelerate the global transition toward renewable energy and make the burning of fossil fuels, the greatest driver of greenhouse gas emissions, increasingly unviable.

“We need the five-year review as a crucial step to keeping countries’ governments accountable to our targets and goals,” Jetnil-Kijiner emphasised. If nations are not emboldened to better their goals every time, the planet may continue toward a devastating temperature increase of 2.7 degrees Celsius or more, experts conclude.

The most pressing question, after the euphoria of the global accord demonstrated in Paris has died down, is how will these lofty promises be implemented? Pacific Islanders are depending on it.

(End)

One of the most significant aspects of the international conference on climate change, concluded in Paris on December 12, is that food security and ending hunger feature in the global agenda of the climate change debate.

The text of the final agreement adopted by the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change recognizes “the fundamental priority of safeguarding food security and ending hunger and the special vulnerability of food systems production to the impacts of climate change.”

Indeed, of the 186 countries that presented voluntary plans to reduce emissions, around a hundred include measures related to land use and agriculture.

The approved programme of measures constitutes a sector-by-sector program to be implemented by 2020, which implies there will be ongoing focus on agricultural issues and not just about energy, mitigation or transportation, which drew so much of the attention in Paris.

In the next years the commitments must be implemented, which will require helping developing countries make necessary adaptations through technology transfer and capacity building.

The Green Climate Fund, comprising 100,000 million per year provided by the industrialized countries, will be a key contributor to this process. Contributions of additional resources to the Fund for the Least Developed Countries and the Adaptation Fund, among others, have also been announced.

The issue of future food production, long saddled with a low profile in the media, is increasingly a major concern and poses a challenge to governments.

A recent World Bank report estimated that 100 million people could fall into poverty in the next 15 years due to climate change. Agricultural productivity will suffer, in turn causing higher food prices.

According to Jose Graziano da Silva, Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), “climate change affects especially countries that have not contributed to causing the problem” and “particularly harms developing countries and the poorer classes.”

The facts speak for themselves. The world’s 50 poorest countries combined, are responsible for only one per cent of global greenhouse emissions, yet these nations are the ones most affected by climate change.

Approximately 75 per cent of poor people suffering from food insecurity depend on agriculture and natural resources for their livelihoods. Under current projections, it will be necessary to increase food production by 60 per cent to feed the world’s population in 2050.

Yet crop yields will, if current trends continue, fall by 10 to 20 per cent in the same period, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and higher ocean temperatures will slash fishing yields by 40 per cent.

One of the least-mentioned problems associated with climate change are the effects of droughts and floods, which have become a near constant reality. On top of the destruction of resources and huge losses brought by these phenomena, they also cause increases in food prices which in turn affects mainly the poor and most vulnerable.

Rising food prices have a direct relation to “climate migrants”, as the drop in production and income is one of the factors that triggers displacement from rural areas to cities, as well as from the poorest countries to those where there are potentially more opportunities to work and have a dignified life.

For example, migration in Syria and Somalia are not driven by political conflicts or security issues alone, but also by drought and the consequent food shortages.

This is why FAO argues that we must simultaneously solve climate change and the great challenges of development and hunger. These two scenarios go hand-in-hand. The dilemma is to make sure that measures adopted to address the former do not generate a constraint on the latter. Production capacity, particularly of developing countries, must not be jeopardized.

This is why developing countries argue that, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, they need technologies and support that they cannot fund with their own resources without hobbling their own development plans.

And since the most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions are the industrialized nations, the countries of the South insist, and have done so long before the COP21, that richer nations contribute to funding the changes needed to preserve the environment.

It was therefore natural that this dilemma was at the center of discussions in Paris and that efforts were made to find an agreement.

The creation of the Green Climate Fund was one of the keystones for an agreement that practically binds the whole world to the goal of keeping average temperatures at the end of the century from rising more than two degrees Celsius. The agreement will enter into force in 2020 and will be reviewed every five years. In that period, many problems will arise and need to be resolved.

Yet beyond the difficulties we will face on the way, it now seems legitimate to expect that the big problem will be addressed and the future of the planet will be preserved.

(End)

By Gunter Nooke
BERLIN, Jul 10 2015 (IPS)

When the three-day conference on Financing for Development begins on Jul. 13 in Addis Ababa, the competitors in this year’s Tour de France will have reached the mountains. They will have already experienced a few spills and will still have many kilometres to go.

A similar situation is facing us with the many important conferences taking place in this important, watershed year for development.

Günter Nooke. Credit: Bundesregierung/Bergmann

The journey began with a successful and financially productive pledging conference organised by Gavi, the global vaccine alliance, in Berlin in January, and it is set to end in December with the conclusion in Paris of a climate agreement that is binding under international law.

In between, we had a G7 Summit at Schloss Elmau in Bavaria in June that will surely remain in our memories for a long time. For one thing, this was probably the first summit where so many guests were invited to attend for such a long time and where development issues were so prominent on the agenda.

Heads of government from Nigeria, Senegal, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tunisia and Iraq were joined by the heads of international organisations such as the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund (IMF), World Trade Organisation (WTO), International Labour Organisation (ILO), Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

As announced by German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Brussels back in 2014, it was a true development outreach focusing on Africa for all that security issues also played a major role.

For the first time ever the heads of state and government of the G7 countries agreed to strive for a carbon-free world by the end of the century. Merkel, Germany’s environment minister at Kyoto in 1997 and the climate chancellor of Heiligendamm in 2007, has once again succeeded in convincing others to join forces in forging ahead with regard to an important issue.“If the countries of Europe and Africa could agree that those who use up more of the permitted volume for storing CO2 in the atmosphere than others should pay more into the climate fund, then we would have taken a huge step forward. And those whose CO2 emissions are lower … should enjoy a comparatively greater benefit from this climate money"

So far what we mostly have are words. Germany is the only industrialised country to have significantly increased its Official Development Assistance (ODA) in 2015.Germany stands by the 0.7 percent target, but is unwilling to commit to a rigid timetable with fixed increments for increasing ODA.

Of course, ODA remains important but there are other sources for financing development. Above all it is about how efficiently the money is spent and whether the burden is fairly shared. That should also be the most important leitmotif for the Financing for Development conference in Addis Ababa.

It will scarcely be possible to get binding financial commitments from everyone in Addis. It would also be a great shame if developing countries were to call for more money from the industrialised countries and donors and the “accused”, having been put on the spot, were to respond by pointing the finger at the poor performances of the developing countries when it comes to governance, legal certainty, human rights and an independent judiciary.

Instead of confrontation it would be better if efforts were made in Addis, as they were in Elmau, to continue laying the ground for working together on a basis of mutual trust, with concrete topics and fields of cooperation being named.

Before the December climate conference in Paris, there will be the General Assembly week in New York with all the heads of state and government, a meeting that is especially important this year.

This will be the occasion for agreeing on new goals for sustainable development, on a new pact on the world’s future with concrete goals (Sustainable Development Goals – SDGs), with targets for both developing and industrialised countries.

The intention is that all countries should each make their own contribution. The SDGs are to be universally applicable, but with shared yet differentiated responsibilities for achieving them jointly.

The success of the Elmau summit was the outcome of a rare harmony between language and substance. The Group of Seven is not just a group formed by the world’s strongest industrialised countries. Following the exclusion of Russia, it has once more become evident how much we need a partnership of countries that really want to build a community of values.

The situation at the United Nations, where 193 nations are represented by their national governments, is different.

Surely, in this critical situation and in the interests of Germans and Europeans, it behoves us to work towards a special trust-based partnership between Africa and Europe. The only way for the countries of Europe and of Africa to develop in peace is by working together as good neighbours.

If we take this partnership a bit further in Addis and in New York, then we will also be successful in Paris and will reach a binding climate agreement. And then we will no longer be able to get away with being vague about the numbers, we will have to share out the CO₂ savings among us and, from 2020 onwards, find the 100 billion dollars for the Green Climate Fund.

If the countries of Europe and Africa could agree that those who use up more of the permitted volume for storing CO₂ in the atmosphere than others should pay more into the climate fund, then we would have taken a huge step forward. And those whose CO₂ emissions are lower than the average level or the maximum level per head according to the dictates of sustainability should enjoy a comparatively greater benefit from this climate money.

This arrangement would be good for everyone in Europe and in Africa. Germany, the strong export nation with emissions levels of about nine tonnes a head, would have to pay a lot of money and countries like Burkina Faso or Malawi would receive a lot. And a country like Nigeria would also finally have an incentive to put an end to gas flaring once and for all.

There are many mountains and cliffs to overcome before reaching Paris, not just for the participants in the Tour de France. However, it is important that we know the route. Otherwise we may find that there are only two parties sitting at the table together in Paris and talking about what they – the United States and China – consider acceptable.

Europe and Africa would be out of the running. This other way is not the route that will lead us to our goal.

Edited by Phil Harris    

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

Is the G7 commitment to an energy transition that aims to gradually phase out fossil fuel emissions this century to avoid the worst of climate change just hot air? Credit: CC BY-SA 2.5

By Lucy Cadena
LONDON, Jun 11 2015 (IPS)

One of the promises made by the leaders of the world’s seven richest nations when they met at Schloss Elmau in Germany earlier this week was an energy transition over the next decades, aiming to gradually phase out fossil fuel emissions this century to avoid the worst of climate change.

Let us be clear: a target of zero fossil fuels by 2100 puts us on track for warming on an unmanageable scale. The only commitment made by the G7 this week was a commitment to climate chaos.

Putting our faith in as-yet-underdeveloped technology fixes such as ‘carbon capture and storage’ and ‘geo-engineering’ to save us in the next 85 years, while the solutions to the climate crisis – renewable technology and community energy systems – exist here and now, is senseless.“The only way to avoid the worst of climate change is to act now, with urgency and ambition. Not by 2100, nor 2050. We need real commitment to real solutions – and the best place the G7 can start is by taking its money – public money – out of dirty energy”

The only way to avoid the worst of climate change is to act now, with urgency and ambition. Not by 2100, nor 2050. We need real commitment to real solutions – and the best place the G7 can start is by taking its money – public money – out of dirty energy.

While the G7 gathered on Jun. 7 and 8, this was the message from people from around the world, who are calling for a ban on all new dirty energy projects and an end to the financing of dirty energy.

The G7’s role in upholding the current dirty energy system is not limited to the subsidies they pour into fossil fuels daily.

G7 countries also directly finance – and profit from – dirty energy projects, particularly in the global South, and in regions where poverty and limited energy access devastate families.

These include projects affecting communities deeply reliant on clean air, water, and land that is polluted and stolen from them, projects among populations most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, and projects where people face harassment and human rights violations for speaking out.

France

Last week, France, host of the 30 November-11 December 2015 Paris climate summit – the U.N. gathering to set the agenda for global climate commitments in the next decades – announced that two of the summit’s key sponsors will be EDF and ENGIE (formerly GDF-Suez).

The French state holds 84 percent and 33.3 percent of shares in these companies respectively. Both are involved in the construction of several very controversial, polluting projects across the world.

EDF is currently planning the destructive Mphanda Nkuwa mega-dam on the Zambezi River in Mozambique, in the face of fierce opposition from local communities and environmental organisations.

A letter from civil society reminds French President François Hollande that these and other projects place EDF and ENGIE among the top 50 companies that contribute the most to global climate change.

With 46 coal-fired power plants between them, EDF and ENGIE are responsible for emitting 151 million tonnes of CO₂ a year – which amounts to about half the total of France’s overall emissions.

Italy

The Italian state owns a considerable number of shares – almost one-third – in oil and gas company ENI. According to a recent report by Amnesty International, last year alone ENI reported 349 oil spills in the Niger Delta from its own operations.

The figure is remarkable – almost unbelievable. Each spill triggers a human and ecological crisis. The scale of the devastation and ENI’s failure to safeguard communities and ecosystems begs the question: is this sheer incompetence, recklessness, or simply utter indifference to the welfare of local communities?

Japan

Japan, the next offender on the G7 list, is the number one public financier of coal plants globally among the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries.

Japan has 24 coal-powered projects either under construction or planned, many of them in Indonesia, Vietnam and India, where the more vulnerable local populations live under the cloud of plants’ toxic emissions.

Emissions of deadly sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from coal plants are currently highest in Indonesia, where the planned Batang coal power plant is set to become the largest ever Japanese-financed plant in Southeast Asia.

United States

A report by Oil Change International indicates that the United States government alone provides 5.1 billion dollars in national subsidies to fossil fuel exploration each year – that’s 5.1 billion dollars into seeking out new sources of civilisation-destroying energy sources.

Canada

Likewise, Canada’s expanding oil sector (caused by the growth in dirty tar sands production, known as ‘the biggest industrial project on Earth’) continues to reap the benefits of massive national subsidies.

United Kingdom

The U.K. government spent 300 times more supporting dirty energy overseas than it contributed towards renewable energy projects during its last term.

The 2012-2013 annual report of UK Export Finance, the country’s export credit agency, announced spending on projects such as a 147 million pounds (228 million dollars) guarantee to support oil and gas exploration by Petrobras in Brazil and 15 million pounds (23 million dollars) in guarantees to a loan for a gas power project in the Philippines.

Domestically, the government is prioritising drilling for new oil and gas, which will require huge subsidies. Hailing carbon-emitting gas as a ‘bridge fuel’ towards a cleaner energy system, the government is delaying investment in renewables to push fracking onto a population that vehemently opposes the dash for gas.

Germany

Meanwhile, Germany – the host of the G7 meeting – has been much lauded for its ‘Energiewende’ (‘Energy Revolution’), with a rapidly increasing use of renewable energy compensating for its nuclear phase-out in recent years.

However, German euros still make their way into the dirty energy machine – through sizeable tax exemptions afforded to fossil fuel producers’ exploration activities – allowing such companies to go further and dig deeper to uncover more carbon that needs to stay in the ground.

G7 Must Catch Up

The G7 countries have done the most to cause climate change. According to the Climate Equity Reference Calculator, they are responsible for 70 percent of historical carbon emissions, while hosting only 10 percent of the global population.

A commitment to a phase-out of fossil fuels in eight decades’ time is not a commitment. It is an easy promise for a politician, who probably will not even be in power in the next decade, to make. It is an easy promise for a rich nation, whose citizens are not the most vulnerable, to make.

G7 societies have grown rich by exploiting the human and natural world. They owe an enormous ‘climate debt’ to developing nations – yet they can barely scrape together the money they promised to the developing world via the Green Climate Fund.

Whether it’s an oil spill in Nigeria, a mega-dam in Mozambique or a coal plant in Java, the sources of our publicly-owned dirty energy are always sites of ecological and social devastation.

Access to energy is a right, but it should not come at the cost of other people’s rights – to clean air and drinking water, to land and food sovereignty, and to sustainable societies.

The international movement for climate justice is building, and will keep up pressure on governments to take money out of dirty energy and reinvest it in democratic renewable solutions that benefit everyone.

The global shift towards a just energy transformation has long been under way. Now, it’s snowballing. People from around the world are showing the way and implementing community-owned renewable energy solutions.

There is a hunger for change, despite continued inaction from governments. G7 leaders, take note: you are trailing far behind and have a lot of catching up to do!

Edited by Phil Harris

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Mar 16 2015 (IPS)

It is now clear that we are not going to reach the goal of controlling climate change.

It is worth recalling that the goal of not exceeding a 2 degree centigrade rise in global warming before 2020 was adopted at the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009 as a formula for consensus. Many in the scientific community had been clamouring for immediate action – and at most for a 1 degree rise – but bowed to political realism, and accepted an easier target.

Roberto Savio

The agreement was to block the rise in global temperature before 2020, and start a process for gradually reverting the climate to safe levels, to be concluded before 2050.

Well, in the last four years, we have already witnessed an increase in temperature by 1 degree, and there is only another 1 degree left before 2020.

The European Environment Agency (EEA), which publishes a report every five years, states that Europe needs “much more ambitious goals” if it wants to reach its declared targets and for 2050, European Union leaders have endorsed the objective of reducing Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions by 80-95 percent compared with 1990 levels.

However, Germany increased its carbon emissions by 20 million tons in 2012-13, instead of reducing them. This means that, in order to reach its targets, Germany should now reduce emissions by 3.5 percent a year over the next six years, which is a difficult, if not impossible, target to achieve.

It will increase energy costs and probably lead to a reaction to block measures which can hurt the economy. By the way, this is the official position of the Republicans in the U.S. Congress, who will fight any climate proposal.Climate change dissenters are clearly unconcerned that the very future of our planet is at stake or, like the governmental system, have fallen prey to the ‘ostrich syndrome’

By now, the effects of climate change have become visible, and not just to the climatologists. Last year the total number of people displaced by climatic disasters (such as hurricanes, landslides, drought, floods and forest fires) reached the staggering figure of 11 million people.

Last month, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a think-tank based in New Delhi, issued a study report citing data compiled by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED) at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, which maintains a global database of natural disasters dating back over 100 years.

The study found a 10-fold increase to 525 natural disasters in 2002 from around 50 in 1975.

By 2011, the cost of natural disasters had ballooned to 350 billion dollars. In the 110 years between 1900 and 2009, hydro-meteorological disasters increased from 25 to 3,526. Together, extreme hydro-meteorological, geological and biological events increased from 72 to 11,571 during that same period.

There is no doubt that the activities of man are having a dramatic impact on the climate and the planet, affecting people’s lives, but – as usual – the world is moving on two levels, which are unrelated and opposed.

One of the main issues among countries at climate negotiations has been how much to invest in combating climate change but here the signs are very discouraging, to say the least. Take the Green Climate Fund, for example, which was intended to be the centrepiece of efforts to raise  100 billion dollars a year by 2020 but, as of December last year, only 10 billion dollars had been pledged to the fund.

This is the track for reducing fossil emissions. Let us now look to the other track: what the rich countries are spending to keep them.

According to a report from the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and Oil Change International (OCI), G20 governments are actually subsidising fossil fuel exploration with 88 billion dollars every year.

The report notes that “with rising costs for hard-to-reach reserves, and falling coal and oil prices, generous public subsidies are propping up fossil fuel exploration which would otherwise be deemed uneconomic.” In fact, G20 governments spend more than twice what the top 20 private companies are spending on finding new reserves of oil, gas and coal, and are doing so with public money.

So, on one hand, the system makes the right declarations of principle and, on the other, does the very opposite.

Meanwhile, there are some signs that the campaign against the need for doing something about climate change is losing credibility.

It is known that some members of the Republican Party in the United States are financed by energy giants, and it goes without saying that they will do whatever they can to boycott any deal on climate change that U.S. President Barack Obama may try to agree to at the next climate conference in Paris in December.

It is also known that a number of scientists dissent from the thinking of the more than 2,000 scientists whose work has contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in presenting the link between human activity and deterioration of the climate. Of course, the dissenting voices have received a disproportionate echo in conservative media.

However, last month, the Washington Post reported that one of the leading dissenters and guru of climate change deniers, Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, had been receiving funds from the fossil fuel industry.

The report cited documents that Greenpeace obtained through the U.S. Freedom of Information Act showing that Soon had been receiving funding from Exxon Mobil, Southern Company and the American Petroleum Institute, among others.

Climate change dissenters are clearly unconcerned that the very future of our planet is at stake or, like the governmental system, have fallen prey to the ‘ostrich syndrome’. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

Edited by Phil Harris   

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to, IPS – Inter Press Service. 

Excerpt:

As governments of 195 countries approved the COP20 final document in Lima in the early hours of Dec. 14, activists protested about the watered-down results of climate negotiations outside the venue where they met. Credit: Diego Arguedas Ortiz/IPS

By Diego Arguedas Ortiz
LIMA, Dec 14 2014 (IPS)

After a 25-hour extension, delegates from 195 countries reached agreement on a “bare minimum” of measures to combat climate change, and postponed big decisions on a new treaty until the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP 21), to be held in a year’s time in Paris.

After 13 days of debates, COP 20, the meeting of the parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), failed to resolve key issues such as the monitoring of each country’s commitment to emissions reductions, recognition of loss and damage caused by climate alterations and immediate actions, representatives of observer organisations told IPS.

The agreed document was the third draft to be debated. The Lima Call for Climate Action, as it is known, stipulates that countries must propose national greenhouse gas emission reduction targets by October 2015.

It also “urges” developed countries to “provide and mobilise financial support for ambitious mitigation and adaptation actions” to countries affected by climate change, and “invites” them to pledge financial contributions alongside their emissions reduction targets. This exhortation was a weak response to the demands of countries that are most vulnerable to global warming, and it avoided complete disaster.

But observers complained that the Lima Call pays little attention to the most vulnerable populations, like farmers, coastal communities, indigenous people, women and the poorest sectors of societies.

“There were a number of trade-offs between developed and developing countries, and the rest of the text has become significantly weaker in terms of the rules for next year and how to bring climate change action and ambitions next year,” Sven Harmeling, the climate change advocacy coordinator for Care International, told IPS. “That has been most unfortunate,” he said.

The 2015 negotiations will be affected, as “they are building up more pressure on Paris. The bigger issues have been pushed forward and haven’t been addressed here,” he said.

Harmeling recognised that an agreement has been reached, although it is insufficient. “We have something, but the legal status of the text is still unclear,” he said. If there is really a “spirit of Lima” and not just a consensus due to exhaustion, it will begin to emerge in February in Geneva, at the next climate meeting, he predicted.

The countries of the South voted in favour of the text at around 01:30 on Sunday Dec. 14, but organisations like Oxfam, the Climate Action Network and Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) were very critical of the result. The Lima negotiations “have done nothing to prevent catastrophic climate change,” according to FoEI. “What countries need now is financing of climate action and what we need is urgent action now, because we need our emissions to peak before 2020 if we are to stay on a safe path.” -- Tasneem Essop

More than 3,000 delegates met Dec. 1-13 for the complex UNFCCC process, with the ultimate goal of averting global warming to levels that would endanger life on Earth.
Peruvian Environment Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who chaired the COP 20, extended the meeting in order to build bridges between industrialised countries, the largest carbon emitters, who wanted less financial pressure, and developing countries who sought less control over their own reductions.

“Although we seem to be on opposite sides, we are in fact on the same side, because there is only one planet,” said Pulgar-Vidal at the close of the COP.

The specific mandate in Lima was to prepare a draft for a new, binding climate treaty, to be consolidated during 2015 and signed in Paris. Methodological discussions and fierce debates about financing, deadlines and loss and damage prevented a more ambitious consensus.

“What countries need now is financing of climate action and what we need is urgent action now, because we need our emissions to peak before 2020 if we are to stay on a safe path,” Tasneem Essop, climate coordinator for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), told IPS.

“We need to protect the rights of climate impacted communities,” she said. The defencelessness of the most vulnerable people on the planet is what makes action a matter of urgency.

However, the Lima agreement contains few references to mechanisms for countries to use to reduce their emissions between 2015 and 2020, when the new treaty replacing the Kyoto Protocol is due to come into force.

These actions need to start immediately, said Essop, as later measures may be ineffective. “What governments seem to be thinking is that they can do everything in the future, post 2020, when the science is clear that we have to peak before that,” she told IPS.

Unless action is taken, year by year extreme climate, drought and low agricultural yields will be harder on those communities, which bear the least responsibility for climate change. Essop believes that governments are waiting for the negotiations in Paris, when there were urgent decisions to be taken in Lima.

Among the loose ends that will need to be tied in the French capital between Nov. 30 and Dec. 11, 2015, are the balance to be struck between mitigation and adaptation in the new global climate treaty, and how it will be financed.

“If we hadn’t come to the decision we have taken (the Lima Call for Climate Action), thing would be more difficult in Paris, but as we know there are still many things to be decided bewteen here and December 2015, in orden to resolve pending issues,” Laurent Fabius, the French Foreign Minister, said in the closing plenary session.

The goal of the agreement is for global temperature to increase no more than two degrees Celsius by 2100, in order to preserve planetary stability. Reduction of fossil fuel use is essential to achieve this.

Mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage are the pillars of the new treaty. The last two issues are vital for countries and populations disproportionately impacted by climate change, but faded from the agenda in Lima.

“It’s disastrous and it doesn’t meet our expectations at all. We wanted to see a template clearly emerging from Lima, leading to a much more ambitious deal,” said Harjeet Singh, manager for climate change and resilience for the international organisation ActionAid.

“What we are seeing here is a continuous pushback from developed countries on anything related to adaptation or loss and damage,” he told IPS.

These are thorny issues because they require financial commitments from rich countries. The Green Climate Fund, set up to counter climate change in developing countries, has only received 10.2 billion dollars by this month, only one-tenth of the amount promised by industrialised nations.

The Lima Call for Climate Action did determine the format for Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC), for each country to present its emissions reduction targets.

However, the final agreement eliminated mechanisms for analysing the appropriateness and adequacy of the targets that were contained in earlier drafts.

Negotiators feel that the sum of the national contributions will succeed in halting global warming, but observers are concerned that the lack of regulation will prevent adequate monitoring of whether emissions reductions on the planet are sufficient.

Edited by Estrella Gutiérrez/Translated by Valerie Dee

Members of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance staging a demonstration at the Climate Change Conference in Lima. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

By Wambi Michael
LIMA, Dec 10 2014 (IPS)

The post-2015 global climate change agreement should be flexible and fully resourced or else condemn Africa to another cycle of poverty resulting from the adverse effects of climate change.

Echoing this view, African delegates and civil society groups at the ongoing (Dec. 1-12) U.N. Climate Change Conference in Lima, Peru, said that some of the continent’s demands were being relegated, yet they are crucial for the post-2015 period.

Azeb Girma, an environmental activist from Ethiopia, told IPS that he was disappointed with the way the negotiations were proceeding.  “We thought to have a pathway to Paris [venue for the next climate change conference in 2015] but Africa is cheated. Africa is demanding adaptation but this has been pushed away. The discussions are leading nowhere,” said Girma.

Some of the negotiators claimed that developed countries were backtracking on some of the positions earlier agreed to at the Durban Climate Change Conference in 2011.

Dr Tom Okurut, Executive Director of Uganda’s National Environment Management Authority (NEMA), told IPS that in Durban parties had agreed that adaptation was supposed to be part of the post-2015 climate deal but some developed countries were not willing to commit themselves in the draft texts."We have a mandate from science, from our people, from the continent of Africa, and from the United Nations itself to push for enhanced global climate action to cut [greenhouse gas] GHG emissions as well as strengthen adaptation; this remains a priority for us" – Nagmeldin El Hassan, Chair of the African Group at the Climate Change Conference in Lima

“We need a legally binding agreement that binds all parties to whatever has been agreed to, unlike the current protocol where parties can opt out of the process. Right now, everything is voluntary and that is why we are not getting very big output here,” said Okurut.

Since the beginning of the Lima conference, the African Group has been pushing for a multilateral rules-based system with a comprehensive outcome aimed at halting the growing threat of climate change to the African continent.

“We have a mandate from science, from our people, from the continent of Africa, and from the United Nations itself to push for enhanced global climate action to cut [greenhouse gas] GHG emissions as well as strengthen adaptation; this remains a priority for us,” said Nagmeldin El Hassan, Chair of the African Group while addressing a group of African journalist covering the conference.

Among the more thorny debates in this round of talks is the scope and format of country pledges or ‘Intended Nationally Determined Contributions’ (INDCS). Some parties, especially the African Group and most of the least developed countries (LDCs), want the focus to be on both mitigation and adaptation, while those in developed countries want the focus only on mitigation.

Earlier in the week, several African environmental groups under their umbrella group, the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), held a demonstration at the convention centre urging ministers and other negotiators to back the African position on INDCS.

“We call on all parties to take seriously their responsibility to agree on deep emission cuts and avoid further climate crisis. Time is running out while the negotiations are moving at a very slow pace,” said Nicholas Ndhola, an activist from Zimbabwe.

“We urge and demand all parties, especially the developed countries, to agree on the scope of INDCs to include all elements and not only mitigation which tends to ignore differentiated commitments towards finance, adaptation, technology transfer, means of implementation and capacity-building,”he added.

John Bideri from Rwanda told IPS that the developed countries were seemingly determined to ensure that issues about adaptation and technology transfer are not adequately agreed and defined as the parties agree on framework for the next agreement to be hammered out in Paris in 2015.

Seyini Nafo, spokesperson of the African Group at the Climate Change Conference in Lima and member of the UNFCCC Standing Committee on Finance. Credit: Wambi Michael/IPS

“It is time to come up with an equitable deal. Lima may be the last chance for us to make a breakthrough and end a standoff that has prevented adequate climate action for decades. Please stand with the poor, stand with the vulnerable,” urged Bideri.

The INDCs bring together elements of a bottom-up system – to be put forward by all countries in their contributions in the context of their national priorities, circumstances and capabilities – with the aim of reducing global emissions enough to limit average global temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius.

According to the London-based CARE International, there is a need to set clear guidelines on the scope and format of INDCs.

“At the moment we run the risk of having to compare apples with oranges – if we don’t clearly define what countries must include in their national climate commitments towards the new agreement due in Paris next year, then it will be extremely difficult to understand how much progress is being made to curb climate change,” said Sven Harmeling, CARE International’s climate change advocacy coordinator.

However,in a statement in Lima,Miguel Arias Canete, the European Union’s Commissioner for Energy and Climate Action, said that “the European Union and other developed countries must take into account the concerns of developing countries that want more adaptation, finance and technology sharing elements, but it should be in a mechanism or process outside of the INDCs.”

He added that “countries’ intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) should be exclusively devoted to mitigation.”

While Africa has been pushing for adaptation as part of the post-2015 agreement, it is not about to give up the demand for mitigation in areas of sustainable land and forest management, especially carbon finance, under the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme.

Dr Ephraim Kamuntu, Uganda’s Water and Environment Minister, speaking at a REDD+ post 2015 discussion organised by the Peruvian government, said that parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) have been slow in implementing the Warsaw REDD+ Framework.

“We would want our colleagues in developed countries to agree on REDD+ result-based financing. This is a very key issue for us in Africa. We affirm the need to integrate the REDD+ into the overall structure of the 2015 agreement for durable and effective climate change governance,” said Kamuntu.

Critical among Africa’s demands is fulfilment of the financial pledges for climate financing.  At the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009, developed countries pledged to scale up climate funding to 100 billion dollars a year from private and public sources by 2020. For the African Group, fulfilling this could make money available for a post-2015 poverty eradication agenda.

Some developed countries, such as Norway and Australia among others, have announced contributions to the Green Climate Fund, bringing the fund to close the 10 billion dollar mark.

Seyni Nafo, African Group spokesperson and a member of the UNFCCC Standing Committee on Finance, told IPS that much more funding was needed.

“Recent pledges to the Green Climate Fund are a small first step, but funding around 2.4 billion dollars per year is not close to the actual need, and is a far cry from the 100 billion dollars pledged for 2020. Lima should provide a clear roadmap for how finance contributions will increase step-by-step up to 2020,” he said.

The European Union has agreed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2030. The United States and China have announced commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a bilateral agreement, sending a strong signal for implementation of an international climate treaty in 2015.

Seyni Nafo said the recent announcements by the European Union, United States and China of their 2030 emission targets were to be commended for proactivity but fall well short of what science requires.

He challenged the European Union and the United States to match stronger mitigation targets with intended contributions on finance, adaptation, technology transfer and capacity-building in accordance with their obligations under international law.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

By Roberto Savio
ROME, Nov 21 2014 (IPS)

Less than a week after everybody celebrated the historical agreement on Nov. 17 between the United States and China on reduction of CO₂ emissions, a very cold shower has come from India.

Indian Power Minister Piyush Goyal has declared: “India’s development imperatives cannot be sacrificed at the altar of potential climate change many years in the future. The West will have to recognise we have the needs of the poor”.

This is also a blow to the Asia policy of U.S. President Barack Obama, who came back home from signing the CO₂ emissions agreement in Beijing, touting his success on establishing U.S. policy in the region.

Roberto Savio

But, more importantly, will give plenty of ammunition to the Republican Congress, which has been fighting climate control on the grounds that the United States cannot engage on climate control unless other major polluters make similar commitments. This was always directed to China, which had refuse to make any such commitment until President Xi, to the surprise of everybody, did so by signing an agreement with Obama.

India is a major polluter, not at the level of China, which has now reached 9,900 metric tons of CO₂, against the 6,826 of the United States. But India is coming up fast. “The incestuous relations between energy corporations and governments are out of the public's eye. It is yet further proof that, even when nothing less than survival is at stake for islands and coastlines, agriculture and the poor, governments are unable – or unwilling – to see beyond their immediate existence”

Goyal has promised that India’s use of domestic coal will rise from 565 million tons last year to more than a billion tons by 2019, and he is selling licences for coal mining at a great speed. The country has increased its coal-fired plants by 73 percent in just the last five years. In addition, Indian coal is of poor quality, polluting twice as much as coal in the West.

Nevertheless, newly-elected Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced that he will embark on a major programme of renewable sources of energy, and there is an apparent paradox in the fact that many of the climate scientists who form the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) are from India. Its Director-General is an Indian, Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, who is also chief executive of the Energy Resources Institute in New Delhi.

The IPCC’s last report was much more dramatic than previous ones, stating conclusively that climate change is due to the action of man, and providing an extensive review of the damage that the agricultural sector is bound to face, especially in poor countries like India. At least 37 million people would be displaced by rising seas.

Indian towns are by far the most polluted in the world, surpassing several times each year the worst polluted day in China.

But what is more worrying is that governments are reacting too slowly. It would take a very major effort, which is not now on the cards, to keep temperature from rising by more than 2 degrees Centigrade, and therefore to start to reduce emissions by 2020. Emissions in 2014 are expected to be the highest ever, at 40 billion tonnes, compared with 32 billion in 2010.

The consensus is that to limit warming of the planet to no more 2 degrees Centigrade above pre-industrial levels, governments would have to restrict emissions from additional fossil fuel burning to about 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide.

But, according to the IPCC report, energy companies have booked coal and petroleum reserves equal to several times that amount, and they are spending some 600 billion dollars a year to find more. In other words, governments are directly subsidising the consumption of fossil fuel.

By contrast, less than 400 billion dollars a year are spent to reduce emissions, a figure that is smaller than the revenue of one just one U.S. oil company, ExxonMobil.

The last meeting of the G20 in Brisbane earlier this month gave unexpected attention to climate, but the G20 alone is spending 88 billion dollars a year in subsidies for fossil fuel exploration, which is double that which the top 20 private companies are spending to look for new oil, gas and coal.

The G20 spends 101 billion dollars to support clean energy in a clear attempt to make everybody happy but, according to the International Energy Agency, if G20 governments directed half of their subsidies, or 49 billion dollars a year, to investment for redistributing energy from new sources, we could achieve universal energy access as soon as 2030.

Another good example of the total lack of coherence from Western governments is that they have pledged an amount of 10 billion dollars for a Green Climate Fund, whose task is to support developing countries in mitigating and adapting to climate change. That amount is two-thirds of what those countries have been asking for and, since its creation in 1999, the fund has still to become operational.

And it was only after the last G20 meeting that the United States pledged three billion dollars and Japan 1.5 billion, bringing the total so far to 7 billion dollars – one-third is still missing.

And now we have the upcoming Climate Conference in Lima, in December, where opinion is that governments will once again fail to reach a comprehensive agreement on climate change – and the amount of time left for the planet will reduce even further.

Besides the fight to be expected from the Republican Congress in the United States, there will be also be opposition from countries that depend on fossil fuels, such as Russia, Australia, India, Venezuela, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf countries.

So, governments show a total lack of consensus and responsibility. If a referendum could be held asking citizens if they would prefer to pay 800 billion dollars less in taxes to avoid subsidising pollution, there are few doubts what the result would be. And there would be same result if they were asked if they would prefer to invest those 800 billion dollars in clean energy or continue to pollute.

But the incestuous relations between energy corporations and governments are out of the public’s eye. It is yet further proof that, even when nothing less than survival is at stake for islands and coastlines, agriculture and the poor, governments are unable – or unwilling – to see beyond their immediate existence. We are direly in need of global governance for this kind of globalisation. (END/IPS COLUMNIST SERVICE)

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Excerpt:

With the United Nations’ post-2015 development agenda currently under discussion, civil society actors in Europe are calling for a firmer stance on human rights and gender equality, including control of assets by women.

“The SDGs are a unique opportunity for us. The eradication of extreme poverty is within our grasp. But we still face very major challenges. Business as usual is not an option,” Seamus Jeffreson, Director of Concord, the European platform for non-governmental development organisations, told at a meeting in Brussels with the European Parliament Committee on Development on September 3.

An Open Working Group has been set up by the United Nations to come up with a set of new Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to replace the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), which range from halving extreme poverty to halting the spread of HIV/AIDS and providing universal primary education by the target date of 2015.“We need to address women's control over assets. The majority of farmers in the world are women but they do not own the land. There is legislation that prevents women from inheriting property" – Seamus Jeffreson, Director, Concord

Development organisations in Europe say a rights-based approach need to be strengthened in the proposed new SDGs or there is a risk these could be traded off in negotiations with major powers that are less committed to human rights.

“We do not see the spirit of a human rights-based approach infusing the other goals. It should underpin the SDGs. The connection is not made that people have rights to resources. We cannot have a development agenda without people’s rights being respected,” Jeffreson said.

Jeffreson’s complaint was echoed by Thomas Mayr-Harting, European Union Ambassador to the United Nations. “From our point of view, a rights-based approach and governance and rule of law need to be better represented in the SDGs.”

While Concord welcomes a specific goal on gender equality within the SDGs, “more details are needed for this to be a goal and not just a slogan,” Jeffreson told IPS. “We need to address women’s control over assets. The majority of farmers in the world are women but they do not own the land. There is legislation that prevents women from inheriting property.”

The European Union will produce a common position before inter-governmental negotiations start. Further input will come from a High-level Panel set up in July 2012 by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to advise on the global development framework beyond 2015.

“We now look to Ban Ki-moon to play a core role in bringing this process together,” said Mayr-Harting, adding that Sam Kutesa, Ugandan foreign minister, who will chair the UN General Assembly from mid-September, will play also an important role.

Ajay Kumar Bramdeo, ambassador of the African Union to the European Union, who also attended the meeting in Brussels, said that more than 90 percent of the priorities in the common African position have been included in the proposed new set of development goals, including its position on climate change.

“The negative impact of climate change is already being felt in countries in Africa. The European Union has been an important historical, political, economic and social partner for Africa and would also feel the impact of climate change on Africa,” he added.

Kumar Bramdeo emphasised the need to mobilise financing from the developed countries through the Green Climate Fund of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), transfer new clean technologies, and enhance disaster risk management and climate adaptation initiatives.

Ole Lund Hansen, representing the UN Global Compact at the meeting, stressed that the SDGs would not be achieved without the active participation of the world’s business sector. “Some figures say we need 2.5 billion dollars per year in additional investments to achieve the SDGs. We clearly need to tap into the vast resources of the private sector.”

The proposed new SDGs, which will make amends for the shortcomings of the MDGs, will be an integral part of the United Nations’ post-2015 development agenda which, among others, seeks to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger from the face of the earth by 2030.

There are currently 17 new goals on the drafting board, including proposals to end poverty, eliminate hunger, attain healthy lives, provide quality education, attain gender equality and reduce inequalities.

The list also includes the sustainable use of water and sanitation, energy for all, productive employment, industrialisation, protection of terrestrial ecosystems and strengthening the global partnership for sustainable development.

The final set of goals is to be approved by world leaders in September 2015.

(Edited by Phil Harris)

Workmen clear a road blocked by a landslide in Trinidad. Compensation for loss and damage from climate change has become a major demand of developing countries. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Mar 31 2014 (IPS)

The latest update of the world’s scientific consensus on climate change finds not only that impacts are already being felt on every continent, but also that adaptation investments are dangerously lagging.

These investments constitute both a key demand by developing countries and a key pledge by the West. Nonetheless, the latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released on Monday in Japan, warns that these shortfalls are growing.

“Global adaptation cost estimates are substantially greater than current adaptation funding and investment, particularly in developing countries, suggesting a funding gap and a growing adaptation deficit,” the report states."We’re taking far too long to discuss these issues, and meanwhile a lot of poor people are becoming more and more vulnerable.” -- Pramod Aggarwal

“Comparison of the global cost estimates with the current level of adaptation funding shows the projected global needs to be orders of magnitude greater than current investment levels particularly in developing countries.”

Further, the report underscores that adaptation shortfalls, as with the broader impacts of climate change, would most significantly affect communities that are discriminated against, particularly in developing economies.

“The report makes very clear what a large adaptation deficit there is while also recognising that, though there’s been a lot of progress on vulnerability, people who are marginalised tend to be the most vulnerable,” Heather McGray, director of vulnerability and adaptation at the World Resources Institute, a think tank here, told IPS.

“This plays out in the debate between developing and developed countries, covering the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and fisherfolk, small farmers dependent on climate-sensitive environments, as well as children and the elderly, those with constrained mobility or higher health risks. More thorough and nuanced treatment of these issues is certainly a step forward.”

Medium agreement

The IPCC, which is overseen by the United Nations, has been publishing climate-related assessments since the early 1990s. The new report is the work of nearly 2,500 authors and reviewers, and constitutes part of the IPCC’s fifth such assessment.

The report is actually made of three sections, with the one released Monday, the second, focusing on impacts and adaptation. It differs from previous iterations in its far robust understanding of the current state of climate change, describing its ramifications as widespread and consequential.

Yet it also warns the world is “ill-prepared” for these changes, and places far more focus than in the past on adaptation. In part, this is because global mitigation efforts have thus far been relatively ineffectual, thus requiring planning for significant impact at least in the near term.

Risk evaluation is a first step towards a climate change adaptation plan. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

“The global community seems to be spending a lot of time on issues around mitigation issues, whereas many developing countries need significant investment in adaptation. We’re taking far too long to discuss these issues, and meanwhile a lot of poor people are becoming more and more vulnerable,” Pramod Aggarwal, an IPCC author and reviewer, told IPS.

“Governments [in developing countries] have been sensitised on this for some time, and where possible most are already taking action. But it’s been clear for some time that significant international support is also needed.”

For the moment, however, the IPCC report suggests little agreement on that assistance.

IPCC reports are consensus documents, and hence require meticulousness over both scientific evidence and concurrence around that evidence. For this reason, important points in the report include reference to a corresponding strength of agreement.

Yet such concord appears to have broken down over the amount of funding required for comprehensive global adaptation initiatives. The quoted material at the beginning of this story, on the adaptation-related “funding gap”, comes with the onerous warnings “limited evidence” and “medium agreement”.

Putting actual dollar figures on the issue of adaptation appears to have been particularly contentious. “The most recent global adaptation cost estimates suggest a range from $70 billion to $100 billion per year globally by 2050,” the report notes, “but there is little confidence in these numbers.”

Source: CCFAS

Further, even these estimates and their caveats were removed completely from the widely read summary for global policymakers. This is almost certain to strengthen a fight at the next global climate summit, in September.

In 2009, leaders of developed countries pledged to make available 100 billion dollars a year for adaptation and mitigation efforts in developing countries by 2020. The United Nations flagship programme to facilitate this pledge, the Green Climate Fund, recently opened its new headquarters in South Korea.

Yet by all accounts, the initiative remains painfully slow in getting off the ground, and some analysts worry that momentum could soon wane. A series of procedural hurdles remains in coming months, including agreement on the particularly contentious role of private versus public funding.

Early warning

The new report suggests that agriculture and food security-related issues will likely see some of the most immediate and monumental impacts of a changing climate. Technical interventions thus hold out the opportunity to help the farmers that constitute the backbone of rural societies across the globe, as well as the societies that depend on them for food production.

“We really need to speed up our adaptation at the local scale, particularly with increased investments in climate monitoring,” Aggarwal, the agriculture expert who reviewed the IPCC report’s chapter on food security, told IPS.

“The IPCC emphasises that climate extremes will be the order of the day, so early-warning systems are critical so that entire farming communities can know what to expect and take action. That, however, requires a lot of infrastructure and capital investment.”

Aggarwal says that while certain governments have begun to start taking significant action on issues of adaptation, poorer countries have not been able to do so. (He contributed to a related analysis that will be released on Thursday by CGIAR, a global agriculture consortium.)

Yet echoing the debate over the type of funding that will fuel the Green Climate Fund, some groups are increasingly worried about the approach that will be adopted in reacting to the needs of agriculture in a changing climate.

The IPCC report “is a wake up call for governments to invest in agricultural systems that are effective and sustainable far into the future,” Emilie Johann, a policy officer with CIDSE, a global Catholic anti-poverty network, said Monday.

“So far, solutions pushed at the international level … will do more to increase company profits than provide lasting and achievable solutions for the small-scale farmers and their communities who produce the vast majority of the world’s food.”

The third part of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report is to be released next month, focusing on pollution. A final synthesis of each of these three sections will be released in October.

Youth activists organised a mock lemonade sale to raise money for the Green Climate Fund in the absence of serious commitments at the Warsaw climate talks in November 2013. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Samuel Oakford
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 21 2014 (IPS)

Facing a crucial meeting this week in Bali, the board of the U.N.’s Green Climate Fund (GCF) once again postponed drawing out the bulk of policy that will guide the fund as it prepares to open later in 2014.

Facing a yawning funding gap, the 24-member board said it would “aim for” splitting the financing it doles out 50:50 between mitigation and adaptation efforts and to devote at least half of adaptation monies to vulnerable regions. In a minor victory, members also clarified language over a mechanism for countries to seek redress with the fund."The corporate capture of the Green Climate Fund is deeply troubling." -- Sarah-Jayne Clifton

The GCF, formally established in 2010, is intended to serve as the primary vehicle for industrialised countries to pay for mitigation and adaptation in the developing world. Almost immediately after its creation, though, wealthy countries began backtracking on their original commitments and started pushing for a greater use of private funds to leverage their smaller contributions.

A paucity of pledges in Bali and a statement indicating the board would “maximize engagement with the private sector” bolstered concerns over the potential for a slow unraveling of donor promises and a watering down of what began as a clear-cut way of repaying developing countries for damages caused by carbon emissions.

“The GCF Board urgently needs to decide on the shape of the Fund, but progress is grindingly slow,” Oscar Reyes, an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, told IPS from Bali. “Most of what was scheduled for decision in Bali has been postponed. Given the inability to decide on matters of substance, the chances of significant breakthroughs at the next Board meeting in May look extremely slim.”

That next board meeting will take place May 18-21 in Songdo, South Korea.

Aletter signed by 80 civil society organisations called for ensuring the fund “truly prioritizes and meets the needs of climate-impacted people in developing countries, free of undue business and industry influence.”

Credit: http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/

“Climate finance is compensation, reparations paid by those countries most responsible for the climate crisis to those worst impacted,” said Sarah-Jayne Clifton, director of Jubilee Debt Campaign, a signee of the letter.

“It must be adequate and predictable and from public sources, and fully accountable to the developing countries who need it, not the profit-driven multinational companies of the rich world and their financial backers.”

After an original promise of 100 billion dollars was made at the 2009 U.N. Climate Summit in Copenhagen, climate financing dried up as governments facing austerity budgets at home chose to deprioritise it. The Overseas Development Institute estimates multilateral climate financing pledges fell by 71 percent in 2013.

When delegates met in Warsaw last November for the most recent U.N. Climate Summit, rich countries balked at a decreased 70-billion-dollar pledge.

It was hoped that the Feb. 19-21 meeting in Bali would clarify from where and exactly how the fund’s coffers will be filled. Prior to the meeting, the GCF had received 34 million dollars from Germany and South Korea, just enough to pay the staff at its Incheon headquarters.

Without clarification and donor guarantees, the U.N.’s 2015 comprehensive global climate conference in Paris could be thrown into disarray.

Attendees said they would have been happy with pledges of 10-20 billion dollars in Bali but donors offered up less than one million, just over a quarter of it in a highly symbolic donation from its host, Indonesia.

Though complete abandonment of the fund is a long way off, the slide towards private funding is causing concern among even the most cynical of observers.

“The vast body of that money should be from developed country’s budgets,” said Reyes. “It needs to be made political priority.”

The fund was initially intended to avoid replicating climate financing schemes already attempted by multilateral lenders and development banks – lenders who expect the return of at least their principal amount. Unlike those institutions, the GCF was meant not merely to achieve economic stabilisation in poorer countries or repair damage after storms. Instead, its genesis included the moral spirit of reparations for historic wrongs.

Yet like many international climate agreements, time has loosened memories and dampened initial euphoria.

“Our concern is that it doesn’t become ‘the World Bank for Climate Change’ and that it actually focuses on projects that can’t be done by private investors alone,” Reyes told IPS. “But what we see in particular is the [GCF] Secretariat is heavily staffed by people from the developed world where there is this tendency of seeing investment only as what can be leveraged from the private sector.”

Reyes says the 50:50 funding split should be binding and not aspirational. Money earmarked for mitigation in middle-income countries could potentially end up funding cleaner fossil fuel projects like natural gas installations. There had been hope that the board would emerge from Bali with stronger language limiting how much, if any, of funds could be spent on fossil fuels.

Severe flooding is one of many devastating effects of climate change, as the Caribbean island nation Dominica experienced in 2011. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

Representation

In Bali, civil society groups called into question representation at the meetings, which they say gave the business sector and in particular large corporations too much influence.

Under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, non-governmental constituencies are split into nine groupings, only one of which is the business community. That the Bali meetings had only four active observers – two from the business community and two from civil society representing the other eight, including trade unions, farmers and indigenous groups – fueled those accusations.

“The corporate capture of the Green Climate Fund is deeply troubling and yet another example of the interests of private finance and multinational corporations being placed above the public interest,” Clifton told IPS.

A central unresolved point of contention concerns how much of the fund should be dedicated to grants and how much of it to loans, as well as how generous those loans should be.

“One of the issues that should be decided here are the terms and conditions of concessional lending,” said Reyes. “The terms that we were pushing for would be around not contributing to indebtedness –we think adaptation should be grant funding.”

In the aftermath of Typhoon Haiyan – even as its delegates engaged in a hunger strike at the Warsaw summit – the Philippines government immediately took out one billion dollars in emergency loans from the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. Though both institutions provided smaller direct grants, the model troubles groups that have for years campaigned for debt forgiveness in the developing world only to see climate change potentially push those regions towards further loans.

“Climate finance should not be profit-driven, nor forced as loans or other debt-creating instruments on to countries already burdened by both the worst impacts of the unfolding climate crisis and the obligation to service existing unjust, illegitimate debt,” said Clifton.

Like moths to a flame, countries with large financial sectors like Switzerland and the UK have reportedly been talking up the benefits of sophisticated currency swaps as ways to safeguard private foreign investment. While such assurances will be required for certain outlays, groups are concerned that money being pledged does not become a pool for Wall Street to play in. In Bali they had hoped to set limits on the private sector’s involvement – that did not happen.

But Wall Street may end up footing much of the bill itself. Growing pressure in Europe has seen moves to use income generated by proposed Financial Transaction Taxes – levies on the buying and selling of assets – to fill gaps in climate financing.

Youth activists organising a mock lemonade sale to get money for the Green Climate Fund to highlight the lack of serious commitments. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Nov 14 2013 (IPS)

The U.S. delegation negotiating at the U.N. international climate change conference in Poland is pushing an agenda of minimising the role of “Loss and Damage” in the UNFCCC framework, prioritising private finance in the Green Climate Fund, and delaying the deadline for post-2020 emission reduction commitments, according to a State Department negotiating strategy which IPS has seen.

The document, which has been leaked to a pair of journalists covering the Nov. 11-22 COP in Warsaw, outlines the U.S. strategy for the negotiations to diplomats at their various embassies as well as ‘talking points’ for them to push with their respective countries before the talks began.

The paper makes it clear that, despite President Barack Obama’s progressive stances on climate issues over the past year, the U.S. continues to pose difficulties to closing an international global climate deal by strongly resisting the concept of historical responsibility for emissions and positioning itself in opposition to developing countries on the main issues at stake.

COP19 started this year under the shadow of the Haiyan typhoon in the Philippines which put a tragic emphasis on what was anyway going to be one of the main issues to be debated here in Warsaw: the so-called “Loss and Damage” – that is, assistance for countries that are already hit by the devastating effects of climate change (what is already “beyond adaptation”).

Loss and Damage is a relatively new issue on the public agenda of COP meetings: it was in Doha at COP18 last year that negotiators decided to establish in the future a mechanism for dealing with LD.

On Nov. 12, the developing countries’ group G77+China made a public submission to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) with their proposal for what an international mechanism for Loss and Damage under the UNFCCC framework could look like and how it could function. This would now constitute the basis for further negotiations here.

But according to the U.S. State Department position, any work on Loss and Damage should be done under the already existing framework for dealing with adaptation to climate change, not as a third, separate pillar (in addition to the two existing ones, mitigation and adaptation), as the G77+China submission requests.

“A third pillar,” says the U.S. position, “would lead the UNFCCC to focus increasingly on blame and liability which in turn could be counterproductive from the standpoint of public support for the conference.

“We are strongly in favour of creating an institutional arrangement on loss and damage that is under the Convention’s adaptation track, rather than creating a third stream of action that’s separate from mitigation and adaptation,” writes the leaked U.S. document.

The U.S. fears an increased “focus on liability” during the international negotiations on climate because that would de facto translate into an admission of historical responsibility by developed countries for emissions leading to climate change and a subsequent legal obligation to pay a price for this responsibility.

The issue of historical responsibility for emissions has been one of the main bones of contention, if not the main one, over successive COP meetings.

Yet for most developing countries coming to Warsaw, particularly for small island states and the least developed countries, making solid progress on Loss and Damage is a key point on their agenda.

“And if we have failed to meet the objective of the Convention [i.e., preventing anthropogenic climate change], we have to confront the issue of loss and damage,” said Philippine head of delegation Yeb Sano in his emotional introductory speech at the COP.

“Loss and damage from climate change is a reality today across the world. Developed country emissions reductions targets are dangerously low and must be raised immediately, but even if they were in line with the demand of reducing 40-50 percent below 1990 levels, we would still have locked-in climate change and would still need to address the issue of loss and damage,” he said.

“Loss and Damage has been causing very intense discussions,” said Chinese negotiator Su Wei during a briefing Nov. 14. “It will all depend on the political will of developed countries, if they are going to take action to assume responsibility for the emissions they historically produced.”

When it comes to the Green Climate Fund, meant to assist developing countries with adaptation and mitigation and on whose set-up and financing progress is expected in Warsaw, the U.S. position writes, “We’re also working to intensify our coordination in the context of the Green Climate Fund board to shape an institution that could leverage private investment more effectively than any other multilateral climate fund.”

Yet some developing countries are extremely wary of financial assistance promised by developed countries being translated into private investments as opposed to grants and aid.

“Already in the pre-COP summit organised by Poland, one and a half days out of three were dedicated to companies which were there to present to developing countries technology which they could buy to help with mitigation,” said Rene Orellana, head of the Bolivian delegation, on the first day of the COP. “Linking markets to the financial provisions [under UNFCCC] means a diluted responsibility for developed countries.”

Finally, the U.S. position might turn out to pose problems to the European Union as well, because when it comes to post-2020 emission reductions, it says, “There is divergence [among the parties negotiating] on when Parties will put forward initial commitments and the timing of the conclusion of the future agreement, with the U.S. pushing for early 2015 while the EU wants commitment on the table in September 2014.”

COP19 in Warsaw is supposed to advance negotiations both when it comes to setting up a mechanism for post-2020 emission reductions by countries across the globe and to tightening current emission targets of developed countries (2020 targets are deemed insufficient to keep the world on track for two degrees as a target maximum temperature rise).

On post-2020 emissions, a consensus is emerging that countries would present emission pledges before COP21 in Paris 2015 (when a new international climate agreement is expected to be signed) which would then be assessed for appropriateness in light of what is needed to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius.

Coming forward with emission pledges in early 2015, for which the U.S. is pushing, would mean giving less time for an international review of the appropriateness of the pledges, especially a review that could happen at the COP20 in Peru, a host that could potentially be tougher on developed countries.

Responding today to the leaking of the draft, the U.S. delegation in Warsaw told the Indian newspaper The Hindu: “The U.S. is dedicated to achieving an ambitious, effective and workable outcome in the UNFCCC and in Warsaw, and our positions are designed to further this goal. We are engaging with all countries to find solutions that will give momentum to the effort to tackle climate change.”

A quarter of a million students across the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius will be exposed to principles of sustainable development. Educating youth about sustainable development is part of this long-term vision to establish a new, ecologically sound economy. Credit: Nasseem Ackburally/IPS

By Nasseem Ackbarally
PORT LOUIS, Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

Tourism, agriculture, fishing, the water supply – climate change threatens the very foundations of society and the economy in Mauritius. As the Indian Ocean island nation develops its adaptation strategies, it is working to ground the next generation of citizens firmly in principles of sustainable development.

Launched on Jul. 5, the country’s National Climate Change Adaptation Policy Framework (NCCAPF) included familiar but worrying predictions for the future. Half of this tourist destination’s beaches could disappear by 2050, swallowed by rising seas and increasingly violent and frequent storms. Fresh water resources could shrink by as much as 13 percent while demand will rise steadily.

“We are shocked to learn that our beautiful island – or part of it – may disappear because of a rise in sea levels,” student Felicia Beniff told IPS as she emerged from a class on the environment and climate change with four friends. “We are afraid. We have many more years to live. Where will we go?”

The teenage students at MEDCO Cassis Secondary School in the Mauritian capital Port Louis are among a quarter of a million students across the island that will be exposed to principles of sustainable development.

Mauritius is working hard to correct unsustainable practices, notably through the Maurice Île Durable. Educating youth about sustainable development is part of this long-term vision to establish a new, ecologically sound economy.

At Rabindranath Tagore State Secondary School in Ilot, northern Mauritius, students put organic waste into a compost bin.

“We collect plastic bottles. We turn off the lights and the air-conditioners when we leave the classroom. We open the windows to aerate the classes. This reduces the school’s expenses. We also plant trees,” one of the students, Ashootosh Jogarah, told IPS.

His friend, Varounen Samy, told IPS that they have “now changed our attitude towards the environment.”

Mahen Gangapersad, the school’s rector, believes Mauritians have taken the environment for granted for too long without realising the harm they cause to natural resources. The new education programme aims to correct this.  “Better late than never,” he told IPS.

Tree planting, the installation of photovoltaic cells for renewable energy, endemic gardens, backyard gardening, waste segregation, compost-making, rain water harvesting and water control are now a reality at many schools. The plan is to expose the entire student population.

“So we are reaching out to 250,000 plus people,” Veenace Koonjal, special adviser to the Minister of Education told IPS. He believes this training will have a great impact on awareness among the country’s population of 1.2 million as students take what they learn home to their families and communities.

“Climate change is weakening the economic, social and environmental pillars of the island,” said the Mauritian Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development Deva Virahsawmy, at the launch of the NCCAPF.

The launch of the newly-completed policy framework was accompanied by the opening of a Climate Change Information Centre in Port Louis, an initiative that will gather local and regional information on climate change and make it available to everyone – scientists, engineers, architects, as well as farmers and students.

Strengthening and broadening knowledge, awareness and information about climate change is a key part of this island nation’s response to global warming. Mauritius, like other island states, can expect to bear the full brunt of climate change despite contributing very little to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause it.

Floods devastated the Mauritian capital, Port-Louis, on Mar. 30 but locals can expect the island to be affected by more floods, landslides and cyclones in the coming years because of climate change. Credit: Nasseem Ackbarally/IPS

Further, the policy framework acknowledges that the island’s geography and topography limit what can be done to counter harmful impacts of global warming on fishing and the coastline, tourism, or agriculture.

Khalil Elahee, chairperson of the government’s Energy Efficiency Management Office, believes the population has begun to realise the very serious impact that climate change is already having.

“People want sustainable development. So it is essential we start a new way of living and developing our island, climate change or not,” he told IPS.

“Whatever we do may not be enough but the measures taken by Mauritius in its climate change education programme help to mitigate the impact of climate change on the island,” Elahee said.

Virahsawmy said that climate change education would enable Mauritius to strengthen its resilience in key sectors of its economy and mitigate the risks and prevent losses of lives and property.

Mauritius has already received three million dollars from the Africa Adaptation Programme – funded by the Government of Japan’s Cool Earth Partnership for Africa – to integrate and mainstream climate change adaptation into its institutional frameworks and core development policies.

An official from the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development told IPS that a Technology Needs Assessment (TNA) project is also being implemented this year. It will receive technical support from the United Nations Environment Programme’s Division of Technology, Industry and Economics, and its Risoe Centre in Denmark. It is funded by the Global Environment Fund (GEF) to the tune of 120,000 dollars.

The key aim of the TNA is to bridge the gap between identifying appropriate technologies and the design of action plans. The aim is to allow Mauritius to implement technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and support adaptation to climate change that is consistent with national development priorities.

The government hopes to secure more funding for adaptation and mitigation efforts from the Green Climate Fund, the U.N. Adaptation Fund and the GEF.

Beyond the classroom, several other programmes run by NGOs complement what young people are learning at school. The Youth be Aware programme of the Mauritius Red Cross, for example, engages 600 young people on the risks posed by climate change to the island.

Residents of Port of Spain make their way down flooded streets. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jul 21 2013 (IPS)

The Green Climate Fund (GCF), created under the auspices of the United Nations to finance the huge investments demanded by climate change, was opened up to participation by civil society and private sector representatives as observers in March.

But non-governmental organisations are pressing for more active participation now that the GCF is moving into the crucial phase of designing policies and distributing resources, especially with regard to the controversial Private Sector Facility.

“Now they are discussing what type of observers and executors can be in the Fund. This opens up the possibility of having financial institutions involved as executors, and they are studying the criteria for qualification and safeguards,” Colombian attorney Astrid Puentes, co-director of the Interamerican Association for Environmental Defense (AIDA), told Tierramérica. In this process, “we are being ignored,” she stated.

As one of the observer organisations from the region, AIDA monitors the sessions of the GCF Board, which is based in South Korea.

The creation of the GCF was agreed at the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, held in late 2011 in Cancún, Mexico. The industrialised countries pledged to deliver 30 billion dollars in new and additional financing by 2012, with priority placed on resources for climate change adaptation in the poorest and most vulnerable countries.

A longer-term target was set for the mobilisation of 100 billion dollars annually by 2020.

The World Bank was designated as the interim trustee of the Fund for the first three years.

A year later, in Durban, South Africa, a governing body was created: the 24-member GCF Board, composed of an equal number of members from developed and developing countries, responsible for the execution and oversight of the Fund’s resources.

At its next meeting, scheduled for this September in Paris, the Board will assess the progress made in the development of a business model framework, transparency policies, private financing and conditions for access to GCF resources.

“It’s important that, whatever is done, it has to do with small and medium enterprises. The approach should focus on the needs of ordinary people in the developing countries and then how the private sector is engaged,” Karen Orenstein, an international policy analyst at Friends of the Earth U.S., told Tierramérica.

“It’s incredibly important that a country decides what is good and the private sector obliges to it,” she added.

At a meeting on Jun. 25-28 in the South Korean city of Songdo, where it is based, the GCF Board decided that the Private Sector Facility will commence its operations through accredited national, regional and international implementing entities and intermediaries. It also established that it may over time work directly with private sector actors, subject to consideration by the Board.

This decision derailed attempts by the United States and Australia to give corporations direct access to the funds, bypassing government control.

A report published in June by a consortium of five civil society organisations, funded by the UK-based Climate and Development Knowledge Network (CDKN), stressed the role of national institutions.

“Especially the GCF should prioritise access of local (…) actors to the available funds,” the report states, adding that “clear funding modalities must be put in place to ensure multi-stakeholder decision-making processes, including sub-national and non-state actors, as well as the devolvement of funds to the local level.”

Private sector companies, which also have representatives as GCF observers, want the funds transferred by the wealthy countries to cover their investments in clean development projects in developing countries, which they can claim as reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

Latin American delegates were missing in Songdo, since neither Mexican Senator Ernesto Cordero, a Board member, nor his alternate, Rodrigo Rojo, deputy director for International Affairs at the Ministry of Finance of Chile, was in attendance.

But that was not the only problem.

“The last meeting was disastrous for citizen participation. They shut us out of some discussions, like the definition of the business model, on the pretext that our organisations have no experience in these matters,” said Puentes.

Orenstein commented that “the countries that were the major obstacles were Australia and the U.S., who boast they are the champions of transparency. The real champions were Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and indeed Sweden. It was regressive; they vetoed the presence of civil society delegates in the most important discussions.”

In November 2012 almost 34 billion dollars in climate finance had been pledged, according to an analysis conducted by institutions in the United States, Germany, the United Kingdom, Japan and Norway. Of this total, 28 million had been requested and/or budgeted by the executive bodies of the countries that have pledged the funds.

However, it is difficult to determine if these resources are genuinely “new and additional” and not part of previously allocated assistance or financing. Every country uses different instruments and channels resources through different schemes and institutions. It also is not clear if priority has been placed on adaptation measures in the most vulnerable countries.

The funds actually invested total barely three billion dollars.

On Jun. 24, the day before the last GCF Board meeting began, a large group of non-governmental organisations sent the Board a letter highlighting key issues regarding transparency and public participation and requesting that they be addressed at the meeting.

“The Board would benefit from having civil society participation given the vast expertise and experience found among the different groups and individuals that represent civil society,” the letter emphasised.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network.

Excerpt:

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.

Excerpt:

Mexico is particularly vulnerable to increasingly frequent extreme weather events, which make climate change mitigation and adaptation measures essential to preserving its spectacular natural landscapes, like Pico de Orizaba, Mexico. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Emilio Godoy
MEXICO CITY, Jun 8 2013 (IPS)

The Climate Change Fund set up in November in Mexico faces enormous challenges such as the enforcement of anti-corruption standards, which make it unlikely that concrete actions will begin this year, according to civil society organisations.

The fund, which will allocate resources to mitigate and adapt to climate change, was created under the General Climate Change Law of June 2012, with an initial budget of only 78,000 dollars, assigned mainly for administrative expenses.

The initiative was adopted in accordance with the global strategy that emerged at the 16th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 16) held in December 2010 in the southeastern Mexican city of Cancún.

“We know that recipient countries face significant corruption challenges,” and that is a concern because “the Mexican fund may be a model” for other countries that need assistance, Lisa Elges, the head of the Climate Governance Integrity Programme for Transparency International (TI), told IPS.

“A corruption risk assessment is needed, as well as people’s participation and involvement in monitoring the process,” she said.

TI, the global anti-corruption watchdog, is planning to publish in July or August a report on climate finance mapping and assessments which will analyse funds received by nine countries, including Mexico, the Dominican Republic and Panama.

The TI experts found failures of accountability, of dispute settlement mechanisms and of coordination with national funds. In addition there were conflicts of interest between actors involved, such as companies, and a lack of monitoring for projects from initial design to completion.

Mexico’s Climate Change Fund is meant to attract and channel public, private, national and international resources for actions against the effects of climate change, with a priority on adaptation.

Mexico is particularly vulnerable to increasingly frequent and extreme weather events, such as severe drought, intense rains and frosts, for which measures of mitigation and adaptation are essential.

Since 2006, this country of 118 million people has received more than seven billion dollars in loans or donations from the private sector, multilateral bodies and other countries for environmental policies, in response to the government’s call for resources to overcome the challenges, according to the Mexican Centre for Environmental Law (CEMDA).

Among the ongoing projects is the restoration of wetlands in the Gulf of Mexico, financed by the World Bank, and the design of a model for monitoring, verifying and reporting in the forestry sector, an initiative that is due to be launched in 2015, with aid from Norway.

Carlos Tornel, a public policy analyst at CEMDA, told IPS that the climate fund “must have clear rules, accountability and transparency, and should not be the only financing mechanism.”

A report on the flow of resources to Mexico’s climate fund from the public coffers, international institutions and the private sector will be published this month by CEMDA.

In the view of the government of conservative President Enrique Peña Nieto, it is preferable to have a well-defined structure and guidelines in place first, before beginning to finance projects.

“We want to design something that really works well. We have to make it transparent, make it functional, and reduce costs,” Luis Muñozcano, the assistant director general for climate change projects in the environment ministry, told IPS.

Draft guidelines for the climate change fund stipulate the definition of the responsibilities of those involved, procedures for receiving and disbursing funds, a mechanism for accessing information, and transparency in accounting for the resources, among other aspects.

By 2020 a system of financial incentives and subsidies should be in place for adaptation and mitigation measures.

The Mexican fund can also channel cash to energy efficiency, renewable energy, biomass use and clean transportation projects.

Every year Mexico emits some 748 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), one of the main greenhouse gases responsible for global warming, according to the most recent measurements collected in 2010 and officially released last December.

The General Climate Change Law establishes a plan to reduce emissions by 30 percent by 2020 and by 50 percent by 2050, with reference to 2000 levels.

Mexico’s Fifth National Communication delivered in 2012 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change predicts that achieving the planned emissions reduction by 2020 will require 138 billion dollars of investment.

“We want a standardised approach. The issue is to see if money was efficiently used. Moreover, in practical terms, the complaints schemes are not operational at the national level,” said Elges, referring to the global Green Climate Fund created at COP 16 and originally promised starter capital of 30 billion dollars.

At the Cancún meeting it was agreed that industrialised nations should contribute 100 billion dollars a year to that fund from 2020 onwards. The Green Climate Fund is devoted to assisting poor countries to adapt to climate change impacts and to develop low-carbon economies. The World Bank is to administer the resources for the first three years according to the standards of the Convention.

The Green Fund is governed by a council of 24 delegates, with equal numbers from developed and developing nations, who are responsible for use and oversight of the resources.

After South Korea was elected as the headquarters of the Green Climate Fund last year, TI received a complaint from one of the other candidate countries accusing South Korea of buying votes with irregular payments. But the Asian country denied the allegations and the case did not proceed further.

However, Elges saw this as a warning sign of the dark shadows that can haunt these kinds of funds.

The other candidates to host the central office of the Green Climate Fund were Germany, Mexico, Namibia, Poland and Switzerland.

“It remains to be seen who is going to allocate the budget. So far, the finance ministry is the only body responsible,” said Tornel.

The Green Climate Fund is expected to channel some 100 billion dollars a year to help developing countries counter and adapt to climate change. Impacts include severe flooding, as the Caribbean island nation Dominica experienced in 2011. Credit: Desmond Brown/IPS

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Mar 12 2013 (IPS)

As the new board of the United Nations Green Climate Fund meets in Berlin this week, activist and watchdog groups here and around the world are expressing frustration over proposed rules they say are already significantly limiting civil society participation in the new initiative.

The fund, created in 2010 under the auspices of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), is eventually expected to channel some 100 billion dollars a year to help developing countries counter and adapt to climate change. Yet because it has no fundraising capability itself, the source of that money has yet to be decided upon.Unfortunately, the whole discussion has become part of a much larger geopolitical struggle, part of much broader narratives.

In weeklong meetings this week, the Green Climate Fund (GCF) board members are slated to engage in critical discussions on that funding model. This will include the role that private sector financing is expected to play, an issue that has divided developed and developing countries.

“Decisions taken at the Green Climate Fund board are central to how the needs of climate vulnerable communities will be met, so it is essential that their deliberations are open and transparent,” Janet Redman, co-director of the Sustainable Energy and Economy Network at the Institute for Policy Studies, a Washington think tank, said Tuesday.

“At this point it seems the board wants to limit public participation, access and voice. That would be a huge step backward.”

On Tuesday, 73 international civil society organisations sent the GCF’s leadership an open letter decrying a lack of rules conducive to their “meaningful” participation.

“The active and engaged participation of civil society at the Board and country level is essential for creating an effective, equitable and environmentally sound Fund that can be responsive to the differentiated needs of men and women, minorities and indigenous peoples increasingly impacted by climate change,” the letter states.

The signatories urge the fund to build on the experiences of other international funds “rather than permitting a retreat to operations that are less transparent and accountable, as is currently the case”.

Among broad policy recommendations and potential procedural tweaks, the letter pushes for a system of permanent observers allowed to participate in all meetings and the broadcasting of board proceedings on the Internet. The signatories also suggest a process by which to accredit stakeholders and “sufficient financial resources … to support their effective participation”.

“I would be pleasantly surprised if the GCF board started to view civil society as valuable partners in shaping the GCF into a 21st century institution based on science and equity, but I’m not going to hold my breath,” Karen Orenstein, a Washington-based campaigner with Friends of the Earth U.S., a watchdog group, told IPS from Berlin.

“Already the interim parametres set up for our participation Wednesday – the first day of the Berlin meeting – are overly restrictive. At some point in the not-too-distant future, though, the marginalisation of civil society in this process is going to become a real liability that will come back to haunt the board.”

Paradigm shift

Developing countries have keenly watched the development of the GCF. In mid-February, a joint statement from ministers of Brazil, China, India and South Africa urged the prioritisation of the “early and meaningful operationalisation” of the fund.

Yet thus far, progress has been slow. Last year, South Korea agreed to host the institution’s secretariat, and a 24-member executive board has been named, comprising equal numbers of representatives from developed and developing countries.

But so far, significant funding has been notably lacking.

When the fund was set up, developed countries promised 30 billion dollars as starter capital. According to a February statement by Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan, however, only around seven billion dollars of that has so far come in, undoubtedly affected in part by austerity concerns in Europe, the United States and elsewhere.

For this reason, many observers are particularly interested in this week’s deliberations over the role that the private sector will play in funding the GCF. Particularly since the 2008 financial crisis started to squeeze national governments, bilateral and multilateral donors, including the United Nations, have increasingly looked for ways to rely on private sector capital.

“Many members of the board from developed countries have said they don’t want to talk about potential sources for the public money, and have focused instead on how to leverage private capital,” the Institute for Policy Studies’ Redman told IPS from Berlin.

“But many developing countries are saying the GCF should be largely funnelling public money, and are talking about the possibility of raising finance through, for instance, taxing financial transactions or carbon. Unfortunately, the whole discussion has become part of a much larger geopolitical struggle, part of much broader narratives.”

Further, when the GCF does engage with the private sector, she cautions, the focus should be not on major multinational investors but rather on local actors interested in developing sustainable national economies.

“The GCF wants to bring about a paradigm shift, but we’re not going to avoid any climate catastrophe unless we get a profound shift in the organisation of our economies,” she says.

“Clearly that includes the private sector, and we certainly want to include private sector entrepreneurs in countries most affected by climate change. But what we can’t do is provide fertile ground for foreign direct investments that look to extract profit from developing countries rather than working to build up sustainable local economies.”

Because the UNFCCC framework offered little guidance on the source of GCF funding, the issue is open to significant interpretation. The U.S. government, among others, has suggested that the 100-billion-dollar pledge, to be raised yearly by 2020, can be made up partially by private sector investments.

Yet Friends of the Earth’s Orenstein and others have strongly cautioned against this reading.

“Private climate finance cannot be a substitute for direct public support – the 100 billion dollars developed countries have promised must be made up entirely of public funds,” she says.

“Private finance would be especially difficult to deploy in low and lower-middle income countries. Many areas in need of funding, especially adaptation, will simply not turn a profit.”

While advocates are hoping this week to lay a progressive conceptual basis for the funding discussion, the board’s discussion on an overall model for the GCF is expected to stretch until at least September.

COP 18 president Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah addresses a roomful of young delegates. Credit: Sallie Shatz – Courtesy of COP 18

By Stephen Leahy
DOHA, Dec 3 2012 (IPS)

The new Green Climate Fund to help developing countries cope with climate change may one day have a bigger budget than the World Bank. At the moment, however, the Fund is empty.

No financial pledges have been made even though the Fund is supposed to begin dispensing money in 2013.

“Finance is at the heart of negotiations here,” said Oxfam International climate change policy advisor Tim Gore on the sidelines of the UN climate change negotiations at the 18th meeting of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 18), taking place in the capital of Qatar until Dec. 7.

“The issue has come to a head in Doha. Developing countries are bitter and saying rich industrialised countries are once again failing to deliver on their promises,” Gore told Tierramérica.

“The NGO community is calling on the COP president to convene a special roundtable on finance next week during the high-level segment,” he said.

Without that call by COP president Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah of Qatar, many ministers will arrive next week without the authority to do anything on finance. “I doubt the meeting will be successful without this,” added Gore.

In 2009, at COP 15 in Copenhagen, “developing countries bought into the sales pitch” by industrialised countries that they would get financial help beginning in 2013 and ramping up to 100 billion dollars a year in new and additional funding by 2020, said Gore.

In exchange for getting this Green Climate Fund – officially adopted at the following COP, in Cancún – they signed on to the Copenhagen Accord, a U.S.-backed voluntary emission reduction agreement.

This was a big compromise. Not only did developing countries want a legally binding agreement, they wanted larger emission reduction commitments from industrialised nations and they wanted a lot more money to help them cope with the impacts of climate change, said Gore.

To bridge the gap between 2010 and 2012, developed countries also agreed to a “Fast Start Finance” programme of 30 billion dollars.

But not all of that promised money has been delivered, and most of it was in the form of loans, not grants. Moreover, much of the money was not new or additional, but came out of development aid, said Nithika Mwenda of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance.

Tracking a country’s actual contribution to Fast Start Finance and where the money has come from is extremely complex, Mwenda said in a press conference.

The Green Climate Fund must have clear reporting and verification measures along with a forum to independently oversee this, he said.

Should the promised billions for the Fund materialise, this might simply be more bad news for the world’s indigenous peoples if the money goes into massive tree plantations or mega-dams that end up displacing local communities, said Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, an indigenous representative from the Philippines.

“We will be in big trouble if the money goes into the wrong projects,” Tauli-Corpuz told Tierramérica.

The Green Climate Fund is creating environmental and social safeguards intended to prevent this. However, the involvement of indigenous peoples and civil society is limited.

The Fund is run by a board of 24 representatives, 12 each from industrialised and developing nations. There are four observers, two for civil society and two for private industry. Observers cannot vote and are often not allowed inside the room where the board meets, said Mrinal Kanti, a Tripura indigenous person from Bangladesh who has attended meetings as an observer.

“We don’t even get documents in advance. That makes it very difficult for us to participate,” Kanti said at a COP 18 side event. “Many board members are unaware of indigenous issues.”

Strong safeguards will also need to be combined with monitoring and verification and a “grievance” mechanism accessible to local people should a Green Climate Fund-financed project be having a negative impact, said Nira Amerasinghe of the Centre for International Environmental Law.

“Participation by indigenous people is key. The draft rules are very poor right now,” Amerasinghe told delegates.

There is also a major issue around the Fund’s governance. Industrialised countries want the board to run it, while developing countries think it should be under the UNFCCC, which gives every country an equal vote, said Tauli-Corpuz.

“What is happening at this COP is that rich countries are withholding pledges to fund the Green Climate Fund to see what concessions they can get from developing countries,” she said.

“The biggest fight at most of these COPs is over money,” she added.

Costa Rica takes a different view. “We’re not waiting. Acting to reduce our emissions has been very good for our economy,” said Monica Araya, a member of the Costa Rican negotiating team.

Since 2007, Costa Rica has been working towards the goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2021.

This small Central American country is sometimes criticised by other developing countries for taking ambitious steps outside of the UNFCCC process. “It is can be frustrating here,” Araya said in a press briefing.

“There is no question rich countries should do more. But we have to find more countries willing to compromise and put their national interests aside,” she said.

“It is not well recognised, but developing countries have made unprecedented efforts to reduce emissions in 2012. We can do far more, especially middle-income countries, if we work together,” she maintained.

* This story was originally published by Latin American newspapers that are part of the Tierramérica network. Tierramérica is a specialised news service produced by IPS with the backing of the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and the World Bank.

Five months behind schedule, the board of the newest and largest international financing mechanism aimed at dealing with the effects of climate change, the Green Climate Fund, is finally slated to meet this week, just ahead of a late-summer deadline.

On Monday, however, insiders admitted that funding plans for the ambitious initiative – 100 billion dollars a year after 2020, in addition to dealing with a massive shortfall until then – remain unclear.

“We are expecting no serious discussion about the 100 billion dollars at this meeting,” Omar El-Arini, an Egyptian member of the Green Climate Fund (GCF) Board, told journalists Monday, speaking from Geneva.

“We have had very little time to discuss the architecture of funding.”

Given that the board’s responsibility lies in figuring out how to disburse, not raise, the eventual cash, El-Arini said that the upcoming meet, scheduled for August 23-25 in Geneva, would most likely focus on procedural issues. These would include rules for board meetings, the budget for a secretariat and a host country in which to house it.

When the GCF was proposed, under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2009, its aim was to steer money towards the world’s poorest countries to deal with the effects and causes of climate change. At the time, developing countries were asking for 400 billion dollars per year, but eventually settled on a quarter of that.

Still, such a pot of money would dwarf current such efforts. A 2010 report by the United Nations suggested that raising the money would be difficult but doable.

Meanwhile, in the current environment of fiscal austerity, particularly in the United States and the European Union, coupled with a general international erosion in political support for climate-related projects, the question of where the GCF will get enough money to make its mandate realistic remains a pressing one.

Washington has already expressed dissatisfaction over the idea of financing so-called “middle income” countries, such as India and Brazil.

Representation and equity

One issue expected to be decided upon this week – that of the GCF’s host country – could serve as motivation for figuring out the longer-term financing options. Six countries are currently in contention – Germany, Mexico, Namibia, Poland, South Korea and Switzerland – and analysts suggest that the winner would be expected to make the first substantial contribution.

With the GCF made up of just 24 full members (as well as 24 alternates) from across the globe, overarching conversations about representation and equity have reportedly been to blame for the three delays since the board’s scheduled first meeting.

“It is quite unfortunate that we ended up with equal representation for developed and developing countries, meaning that there is place for just 12 developing countries,” Meena Raman, of the Third World Network, an umbrella of international NGOs, said Monday from Geneva, noting that the decision over the host country will be one of the most important facets of this week’s talks.

“If you talk about equitable representation, there should have been more seats for developing countries.”

Indeed, increasing recrimination between developing and developed countries have been considered central to the failure of the UNFCCC process to yield substantive agreement in recent years, a pattern that many involved are eager to avoid early on in the creation of the GCF.

The GCF is now said to be under massive pressure to sort out its ideological issues and financing framework before November, when the next international climate summit is set to begin in Qatar.

Public and private roles

Meanwhile, environmentalists and rights activists are warning that developed countries appear to be steering the GCF towards an overreliance on the private sector while marginalising the input of international civil society.

In this context, the procedural discussions this week in Geneva could do much to shape how the fund ultimately functions. Already, for instance, there are discrepancies over the extent to which input from civil society will play a part in the initial rules creation.

“It’s troubling that we might have to fight for civil society observers to be allowed in the room,” Karen Orenstein, an international policy campaigner at Friends of the Earth, an environment watchdog based here in Washington, said on Monday. “This meeting should be open, broadcast on the Internet, and those broadcasts should be archived.”

The framework that may emerge from this week’s discussions could also have a direct impact on the eventual funding decision by some of the largest donors. According to Orenstein, “The U.S. and the U.K. say they won’t commit substantial funding until they ‘see what the fund looks like’.”

At this point, it is unclear exactly what these countries would like to see in the fund’s final outlines.

“There is no clear idea what’s on their mind, what kind of fund they foresee,” El-Arini says.

Yet, Orenstein notes, “in private conversations, representatives of these countries have placed emphasis on a fund that leverages private finance as much as possible.”

No rubber stamps

A report released Monday, of which Orenstein is a lead author, urges the GCF board to follow through on a UNFCCC request that the fund develop procedures that would require close alignment with a host country’s needs before a project can go forward, particularly carving out a substantial space for civil society.

While similar mechanisms do exist in three exiting related multinational initiatives – the Clean Development Mechanism, the Global Environment Facility and the International Finance Corporation, the latter being the World Bank Group’s private-sector arm – the report suggests that these have often become toothless safeguards reduced to little more than rubber stamps.

It also warns that the role of the private sector in the GCF has shaped up as a new fight between the developed and developing worlds.

“Throughout the development of the Green Climate Fund…developed countries…have insisted that the private sector be given direct access to finances from the GCF…[meaning that] firms would not have to clear their activities with national climate agencies,” the report states.

“Many developing countries, in contrast, have objected to direct access…because it could place the private sector in a position of creating de facto climate policies and programs, thus usurping the rightful role of government.”

Anita Onumah displays green chili for export in Accra, Ghana. Experts say that small climate adaptation projects are key for Africa’s success. Credit: Isaiah Esipisu/IPS

By Busani Bafana
HARARE, Jul 27 2012 (IPS)

With the United Nations Climate Change Conference less than four months away, African countries need to present convincing arguments and successful adaptation projects to attract competitive funding for adjusting to changes in global weather patterns, climate finance experts say.

“Africa needs to focus on developing strong arguments for COP 18 and beyond based on clear evidence,” climate change and finance expert, and chief executive of OneWorld, Belynda Petrie, told IPS *. The 18^th Conference of Parties or COP 18 will take place in Doha, Qatar in late November.

Progress on climate change talks will only be measured by how much pressure developing countries can exert on developed nations to agree on a binding outcome in Qatar.

The last climate change talks held in Durban, South Africa in November 2011 ended with an empty Green Climate Fund, which is intended to direct funding for developing countries to cope with climate change.

According to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, poor countries will need nearly 60 billion dollars a year by 2030 to adapt to climate change. Though the World Bank estimates the figure to be between 20 to 100 billion dollars.

The Green Climate Fund was agreed to in Copenhagen in 2009 and commits to making available 100 billion dollars a year by 2020 for mitigation and adaptation activities in developing countries. However, it is still not clear where the money for the fund will come from.

“COP 18 alone is unlikely to yield major outcomes on climate finance. There is simply not enough time between decisions made during COP 17 in Durban and COP 18 to see major progress by then,” Petrie told IPS.

The answer to the question of funding is particlarly pertinent for developing nations, especially those on the African continent.

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that the continent is “highly vulnerable to the various manifestations of climate change.”

As a result, the panel says, Africa faces food insecurity from declines in agricultural production and an uncertain climate; vector- and water-borne diseases, especially in areas with inadequate health infrastructure; it is vulnerable to sea-level rise and; will see the exacerbation of desertification.

The panel has predicted that Africa’s warming trend would be 1.5 times more than the global trend, with Southern Africa expected to be about three to four degrees warmer by the close of the century as a result of climate change. In addition, the panel predicted that the African continent would experience increased water stress by 2020.

The outcome of the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development or Rio + 20 summit, held recently in Brazil, has triggered mixed reactions as it had no relevance for climate change negotiations, and the effects of climate change across Africa.

The Africa Progress Panel has said that the lack of commitment to defined and measurable sustainable development goals is a profoundly disturbing outcome. The panel consists of 10 distinguished individuals from the private and public sector, who advocate on global issues of importance for Africa and the world. Former U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan is its chair.

“The scenario for adaptation funding looks grim,” agreed ActionAid’s International Climate Justice Coordinator, Harjeet Singh.

“Fast Start Finance is coming to an end in 2012 and no new and additional money for adaptation post 2012 has been committed yet,” he told IPS.

But African civil society groups are not sitting idly by. Currently experts from the Pan-African Climate Justice Alliance (PACJA), a network of the continent’s civil society groups, are drafting a policy response to the Rio+20 conference outcomes.

“There are many things within the Rio document that we do not agree with because they are not pro-poor,” said Mithika Mwenda, the coordinator of PACJA. The alliance plans to exert pressure on African political leaders during the U.N. African Ministerial Conference on the Environment to be held in Arusha, Tanzania in September.

Senior fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development’s climate change group, Saleemul Huq, agreed that the Rio+20 outcome document “means very little for climate change or specifically for Africa.”

“I think that developing countries in Africa and elsewhere will be able to get more international finance from global funds, such as the Green Climate Fund, if they start to pursue adaptation actions. The more they are able to prove they can actually do it, the more they are likely to attract in global finance.”

Though this raises another contested issue – how the World Bank and the international community select projects for climate change financing.

Mwenda said that existing projects do not have a direct impact on the majority, and the poor.

“In Africa, we have major projects such as the Olkaria Geothermal power project in Kenya; the Medupi power station in South Africa; the Clean Development Mechanism Fertiliser plant in Egypt among others. All these projects are mitigation projects. But they do not have a direct impact on small communities that are highly affected by climate change and need to adapt to its impact,” said Mwenda.

He said that the African group was keen to see funding for small adaptation projects that directly targeted communities.

Meanwhile, Petrie told IPS that developed countries, which are largely responsible for climate change, should make available finance for adaptation in Africa in the form of grants or soft loans.

“Accessibility is key,” said Petrie.

She said that the negotiators of developing countries should ensure Africa’s easy and direct access to the Green Climate Fund.

“The negotiations are about creating ease of access, but at the same time those providing the sources of finance, for example, donor countries, will insist on stringent requirements,” said Petrie.

“It is our job as Africans too ensure that there is transparency both on developing and developed country sides and that the requirements are the most appropriate to a given situation. We also need to get our house in order and prepare ourselves for direct access.”

Dr. Dennis Garrity, the Drylands Ambassador at the U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification, supported the move by the civil society, and said that Africa’s hope post Rio+20 lies with the people.

“The world is generating ways in which organisations and movements can have influence in forcing decisions, and they need to exercise such powers in order to bring change,” he said.

*Additional reporting by Isaiah Esipisu in Nairobi.  This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

As developing countries struggle with climate catastrophes, EU funding commitments fall short. Credit: Mauricio Ramos/IPS

By Sabina Zaccaro
ROME, May 13 2012 (IPS)

The European Union has been using all means necessary to fill the multi- billion-euro fund for climate change, including the controversial mobilisation of public resources through private financial intermediaries.

Following the Copenhagen Climate Change summit in December 2009, rich countries pledged an annual 100 billion dollars (72 billion euros) by 2020 to help developing countries deal with the impacts of climate change.

The EU committed to providing 7.2 billion euros for the fund over the period 2010-12, most of which will presumably be channelled through the Green Climate Fund

Although originally this money was expected to come from public sources, developed countries are now leveraging substantial amounts of private finance to raise funds. Increasing attention is being given to financial intermediaries that supposedly have easier access to private investment in developing countries, and are thus better able to stimulate financial flows.

Experts say it may be possible to raise funds in the range of 100-200 billion dollars (72-144 billion euros) per year through these intermediaries, as a result of private flows from developed to developing countries.

The idea is that development banks and financial institutions, such as the European Investment Bank (EIB) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), use public money to invest in financial intermediaries working in developing countries to attract private investors.

A recent study by the London-based Bretton Woods Project on the use of banks, private equity firms and financial intermediaries by the IFC found that the latter’s lending has grown enormously over the past decade, with commitments reaching a record 18 billion dollars in the 2010 financial year.

The report found that instead of managing its own loans and investments, the IFC routinely relies on financial intermediaries such as banks and private investment funds. In the 2010 financial year, finance sector lending made up over half of all new project commitments.

There has been much debate over the past few weeks on how much of the EU’s share of the 100 billion dollars should come from the private sector – a trend civil society organisations (CSOs) believe would risk reducing the need for public funds.

In particular, CSOs are calling for more transparency on the use of these funds and clearer reporting on the effectiveness of the funded projects.

Least support for the least developed countries

A recent report by the European Network on Debt and Development (Eurodad) found crucial gaps in knowledge of how money is leveraged through financial intermediaries.

It also assessed the role of these brokers in low-income countries (LICs) and in supporting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), and examined the main monitoring and accountability constraints when using financial intermediaries.

“The problem is that development finance institutions are channelling a tiny amount of climate money to least developed countries (LDCs) or LICs,” Javier Pereira, author of the Eurodad report, told IPS.

“Of all the projects in the IFC and EIB’s portfolios we assessed, (amounting to) roughly 46 billion euros, we only found a total of five projects targeting climate finance in four LICs (Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania and Madagascar). If you use the LDC classification, the figure is only three projects in two countries (Uganda and Madagascar). If you look at the EIB only, it has three projects in three LICs (Uganda, Tanzania and Madagascar, of which only two are LDCs).”

According to Pereira, study results show that “if using intermediaries and focusing on the private sector is going to be the main use of climate finance, there is an actual risk of (skipping over) the poorest countries.”

Various EU officials told IPS that the EU remains committed to its original pledges.

“It has always been clear that this funding will need to come from a variety of sources both public and private; accordingly a variety of instruments and approaches will be needed to meet the challenge, balancing between support for mitigation and adaptation,” one source said.

“In this context, official development assistance (ODA) mobilised (by) private financing, can contribute to creating a positive spiral of regulatory reform, sense of national ownership and – paired with a national Low Emissions Climate Resilient Development Strategy – facilitate the establishment of a sustained enabling environment for private investors,” the official told IPS.

No accountability?

According to report authors, monitoring financial intermediaries is extremely difficult and there is a lack of mechanisms to ensure private climate finance is aligned with developing countries’ priorities.

“To be accurate, these are not private funds, but public funds given to private entities, like investment funds or private equity funds, then recorded as ‘climate finance’ by governments and finance institutions,” Elena Gerebizza from Italy’s Campaign to Reform the World Bank (CRBM), who contributed to the report, told IPS.

“So an item of the public administration actually becomes a (way to) support the private sector, and through actors that are not necessarily committed to the fight against climate change or even contribute to that fight.”

Gerebizza said these private actors have no incentive to respect any environmental or social standards, are not correctly monitored by governments and their projects are not traceable because the information on their ‘climate funds’ is not public. “We don’t even know if they have any impact on climate at all.”

“In addition to the bilateral climate related assistance the Global Climate Change Alliance (GCCA) remains the main vehicle for the Commission to deliver assistance to the LDCs,” EU sources told IPS.

From 2008-2011, the GCCA, an EU initiative providing assistance and capacity building specifically to the LDCs, has contributed over 200 million euros in support of more than 30 countrywide and regional programmes.

“The European Commission also uses United Nations agencies and international finance institutions (IFIs) to help it deliver specific programmes and assistance to developing countries. The related contractual arrangements include reporting requirements on the use of the funds and the activities supported. It is standard practice for the Commission to stipulate intermediate and final reports on the use of funding,” sources said.

This week Europe’s Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard held informal discussions in Brussels with 30 countries including representatives from the LDCs and the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), who are calling for “more ambitious measures to reduce global carbon emissions and finance the fight against climate change.”

A primary concern of the informal meetings was how to close the gap in climate financing commitments. While the EU has committed to 7.2 billion euros for the Climate Fund over the 2010-12 period, the actual contribution so far remains unclear.

By Rousbeh Legatis
UNITED NATIONS, Feb 29 2012 (IPS)

Gender considerations remain largely disregarded in existing climate funds, even though women are some of the hardest hit by the impacts of climate change on livelihoods and agriculture.

Courtesy of Liane Schalatek

The Green Climate Fund (GCF), which would receive a portion of the 100 billion dollars a year expected from rich nations by 2020, could prove to be “important way to put equity back into the multilateral response to climate change”, says Liane Schalatek, Associate Director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in North America.

However, most climate financing – whether channeled through funds, governmental spending programmes, ministry initiatives or bilateral and multilateral agencies to reduce emissions and to help societies to deal with the adverse effects of climate change – lacks gender responsiveness, she stressed.

Together with the Oversees Development Institute, the Heinrich Böll Foundation monitors the 25 most important climate funds (Climate Funds Update), tracking down who pledges what, how much donors have disbursed, and to where climate financing flows.

A participant in the fifty-sixth session of the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) in New York, being held in New York from Feb. 27 through Mar. 9, Schalatek spoke with IPS U.N. Correspondent Rousbeh Legatis about taking stock of climate financing through a gender lens.

Excerpts from the interview follow.

Q: Looking at existing dedicated climate funds, you found gender considerations to be an “afterthought” instead of systematically addressed. Could you explain that further? 

A: Several of the existing climate funds, for example the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) or the Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF), both dealing with adaptation and administered by the Global Environment Facility (GEF), have been in existence for more than 10 years.

Others, such as the Climate Investment Funds at the World Bank or the Kyoto Protocol Adaptation Fund, have only operated since 2008/2009. At the time of their operationalisation, the discussion about gender and climate change was an exotic one that had not yet extended to climate funds and financing instruments and need to make them more gender-aware and gender-responsive. This is a fairly new topic in the global climate finance discourse itself.

However, these funds several years into their operations with their first projects and programmes implemented have realised that without gender considerations, their funding is less effective and less equitable. Their experience confirmed that of development finance, where a focus on gender equality has proved to be a core contributor to better development outcomes.

Better outcome of climate actions is particularly important in times of scarce public funding availability. By including some gender provisions retroactively, for example consultation guidelines that stipulate the outreach to women as a special stakeholder group or the inclusion of a gender analysis in project proposals, fund boards and administrators feel that they have a better chance of benefitting more people in developing countries.

However, putting some provisions retroactively into funding mechanisms is not the same as designing them in a way that is focusing on improving gender equality in recipient countries as an important and expected co-benefit of funding climate actions.

A climate fund designed this way would include gender equality as one of the goals of its actions; would strive for gender-balance on its governing bodies; make sure that there is gender-expertise among its staff to evaluate proposals for their contribution to gender equality; write operational and funding guidelines that stipulate the inclusion of gender indicators and gender analysis in any project proposal; and monitor for gender equality co-benefits as part of a results framework.

So far, no existing climate fund has managed such a comprehensive integration.

Q: Could you describe the consequences if climate funds are not gender-responsive? 

A: If the financing that climate funds provide for mitigation and adaption actions is not gender-responsive, projects and programmes done in the name of climate protection might actually hurt women or discriminate against women (in violation of women’s human rights).

They are also likely to be less effective in reaching long-lasting results. For example, in Sub-Saharan Africa, women are still the primary agricultural producers, accounting for up to 80 percent of the household food production.

As women own little of the land they work on, they are often kept out of formal consultation processes to determine adaptation needs of rural communities and are unable to secure credits or other agricultural extension services.

In times of food insecurity – aggravated by the extreme weather variability and long-term weather pattern changes brought on by climate change – women and girls are often likely to receive less food because of gender-based distribution dynamics within households.

To be effective, adaptation policies and funding for adaptation projects and programmes in agriculture in Africa need to consider the gender dynamics of food procurement and distribution both within households and markets.

For example, they should target rural women in Africa specifically with capacity-building, consultation outreach, technical assistance and tailored agricultural extension services. Without a gender- sensitive lens, climate financing instruments delivering adaptation funding for Africa can exacerbate the discrimination of women.

Q: You point to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) as particularly promising to change business as usual in global climate financing. Why? 

A: The GCF in its governing documents already has several references to a gender-sensitive approach integrated, for example, with respect to gender-balance as a goal on the GCF Board and among the staff of its secretariat.

Most importantly, it has stipulated in its objectives and principles that promoting gender responsiveness is to be considered an explicit “co-benefit” of any funding done by the GCF. Verbally, this is already more than any other existing climate fund has integrated.

Of course, the challenge is now to make sure that these words are operationalised into concrete measures or mechanisms, for example in the form of gender indicators and gender-inclusive stakeholder participation guidelines. The outlook is not too bad: The level of awareness of governments, both of contributing and recipient countries, on the relevance of gender considerations to address climate change, has increased.

It is today far greater than just a few years back when many of the other funds became first active. International organisations such as UNDP (U.N. Development Programme), UNEP (U.N. Environment Programme) or multilateral development banks as implementing agencies of many climate funds have become better in supporting governments in writing more gender-aware funding proposals and investment plans.

Lastly, civil society groups, which have played a key role in the GCF design process in pushing the integration of a gender perspective, are committed to work with the new GCF Board and Secretariat, but also to challenge the GCF publicly if necessary, should it fail to turn promises contained in the governing document into actions.

Of course, the GCF can only be operationalised as a gender-responsive climate fund if it receives the full political and financial support of developed countries quickly. Some large funding pledges now would secure its viability.

It would also send a signal to developing countries that developed countries are willing to fulfill their part of the Durban package without quid-pro-quo, but in the spirit of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities”.

A gender-responsive, fully funded GCF would thus be one important way to put equity back into the multilateral response to climate change.

(END)

Excerpt:

School children plant mangrove seedlings on Dec. 2, 2011 to fortify coastal areas from the effects of climate change. Credit: Courtesy of the Caribbean Coastal Area Management Foundation

By Peter Richards
CASTRIES, St Lucia, Feb 28 2012 (IPS)

As developing countries urgently seek new sources of financing to cope with problems linked to climate change, delegates from the nine-nation Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) met here last week to evaluate potential funds and outline a more concrete vision of what is required for the subregion.

“The workshop sought to raise awareness and share experiences on instruments and best practices related to financing adaptation and sustainable energy, and to generate feedback on planned future action and partnerships,” Keith Nichols, head of the Sustainable Development Division at the St. Lucia-based OECS Secretariat, told IPS.

Supported by the World Bank, it explored carbon financing opportunities to enhance the ability of Small Island Developing States (SIDS) such as those of the OECS to respond to challenges like sea level rise and coastal erosion.

“The pursuit of a green growth agenda which promotes co-benefits in climate adaptation and mitigation, and which supports scaling-up of renewable energy and other economic resilience-building programmes, served as the vision on which this workshop was initiated,” Nichols added.

Delegates discussed case studies on sustainable land management for climate variability and climate change; adaptation challenges in the coastal and marine sectors; climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction in the OECS; as well as an adaptation finance case study from the Pacific region.

The OECS comprises Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Montserrat, St. Kitts-Nevis, Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands.

Chrispin D’Auvergne, chief sustainable development officer for St. Lucia, believes that as a grouping, the OECS can better negotiate access to global climate funding – for which there is plenty of competition among developing nations.

“Recently there was an international fund launched, the Green Climate Fund, but I believe there will be a lot of demand on that fund. There is also an existing Adaptation Fund, but again I think the demand for that fund will outstrip the supply,” he said.

Approved at a U.N. conference in South Africa, the Green Climate Fund is supposed to raise 100 billion dollars a year from rich nations by 2020 for climate adaptation in poorer countries.

“There is also bilateral and multilateral sources available through the international development banks for countries interested,” D’Auvergne said.

“There is loan financing. But for many developing countries, the argument is that we are not the cause of this, so ideally we are not supposed to be borrowing money to finance climate change adaptation needs,” he added.

D’Auvergne argues that “one of the things we have to do as Small Island States is press these developed countries to live up to those pledges and some of them have started doing so.

“But also for our part we really have to try to crystallise exactly what we are seeking in relation to climate change funding, because it’s one thing to go out and say we need funding to adapt to climate change, but it’s another thing to say ‘I have put together a package of what we need’ and say to our bilateral and multilateral sources ‘this is it’, but if it is a generic request we are less likely to receive assistance,” he said.

There was a general consensus that the approach to climate resilience and low carbon development should be embedded into national/sectoral, regional and private sector development plans, and that there is need for additional investment in capacity and public education so that communities shift from “understanding” the key issues to “ownership”.

The main obstacles remain the lack of needed financing, the absence and inaccessibility of data, human resources and mapping capabilities, and a lack of political will and cooperation amongst stakeholders.

Nichols said that among the recommendations outlined to deal with financing climate change adaptation and sustainable energy were the need to link climate change adaptation with disaster risk management and to engage the private sector, particularly insurance companies.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), as envisioned under the now- expired Kyoto Protocol, in which richer countries pay poorer countries to reduce emissions on their behalf, is one possible solution.

But the workshop noted that while the CDM has established credibility as a market mechanism in terms of size, value and types of participants, “it has limitations for sustainable development and GHG (greenhouse gases) reductions in small island states”.

Serious doubts have also been raised about whether many of the CDM projects meet the requirement that they be “additional” – in other words, that the net reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is greater than the cuts that would occur anyway without the initiative.

Other instruments, such as Green NAMA bonds (short for Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions) and the Green Climate Fund, which encourage upfront financing for low carbon development objectives, are also promising to encourage private sector participation.

The workshop was the second initiative by OECS this month on environmental issues.

The first dealt with efforts to strenthen the management framework for ocean resources so as “to ensure their maximum contribution to economic development goals of OECS member states”.

The St. Lucia-based grouping said that the sustainable development of ocean resources represents a key aspect of the economic development of the OECS region, in conformity with best international practices, the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and other related instruments.

“OECS states see a need to consider the possibilities for other resources within OECS waters such as the implications of the recently endorsed CARICOM Common Fisheries Policy, marine transportation tourism, and the exploration for petroleum products.

“The current OECS ocean governance programme is geared towards enabling the OECS Secretariat to create an institutional framework for regional cooperation in trans-boundary oceans management; strengthening national and regional capacities for the development and implementation of ocean law and policy within the framework of sub-regional cooperation,” the Secretariat added.

This article is one of a series supported by the Climate and Development Knowledge Network.

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