In Latin America, where bank loans for environmentally sustainable activities are rare, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is seeking to foment green credit.

In June, UNEP and the Latin American Banking Federation (FELABAN), which groups more than 500 banks in 19 countries in the region, will present an assessment of the issue along with recommendations for credit, insurance policies and investment to include a greater environmental component.

“In Mexico, green credit is in its infancy,” Dolores Barrientos, the UNEP representative in Mexico, who worked in banking for nearly two decades, told IPS.  “Development banks offer some financing. There is plenty of credit and conditions are good, but the banking sector is an oligopoly and the economy is largely ‘unbanked’.”

In 1991, UNEP and a handful of international commercial banks created the Finance Initiative, which fused with a similar project in the insurance industry in 1997, becoming the Finance Initiative: Innovative Financing for Sustainability (UNEP FI).

UNEP FI now brings together 207 public, private and multilateral financial institutions in over 40 countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela in Latin America.

Its priorities are banking, climate change, insurance, investment, construction and sustainable management. The Initiative also promotes research and measurement of the social and environmental impacts of financial operations and products, and training to improve these aspects within the institutions.

“Comprehensive solutions to climate change are needed, including sustainable methods of production and consumption. Banks could organise ways of providing this type of credit,” Joanna Rea, of Bond for International Development, told IPS.

Bond is an association of British NGOs that work for development and financial inclusion.

Mexico’s development banks and the state National Infrastructure Fund have devoted millions of dollars to environmentally sustainable activities.

For example, 960 million dollars were spent on waste water treatment; the Municipal Solid Waste Programme received 98 million dollars; and 960 million dollars went to public transport.

A total of 350 million dollars was devoted to building wind energy farms, while Trust Funds for Rural Development (FIRA), which has joined UNEP FI, contributed 72 million dollars to rural projects.

In the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, private Spanish banks with a leading position in Latin America have financed the development of wind energy projects, based on similar initiatives in Spain.

In 2009, the government of conservative Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched a home appliance replacement programme that replaces refrigerators and air conditioners over 10 years old with new appliances, to reduce energy consumption and increase efficiency.

The goal is to replace 1.9 million appliances in 2012. The government subsidises part of the cost and the homeowner pays the rest.

In 2011 a sustainable lighting programme was adopted, to change nearly 46 million incandescent light bulbs for energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs. So far, 22 million bulbs have been replaced.

“Credits could be provided for public street lighting, sanitary landfill sites and water treatment. Ideally, the financial programme would establish green credit targets and standards for the banking system,” said Barrientos.

In its November 2011 report, Financial Development in Latin America and the Caribbean: The Road Ahead, the World Bank castigated the Latin American banking sector for not opening the flow of credit to promote economic growth through financial inclusion, especially of small businesses and mortgage-holders.

But the report made no reference to green loans.

The UNEP FI Climate Change Working Group focuses on gauging and monitoring the carbon footprint – the amount of carbon dioxide emissions – of investment funds, an index of their impact on global warming. It also assesses to what extent banks are committed to sustainability.

In 2010, insurance companies associated with UNEP FI began to debate a document on the principles for incorporating sustainability in their operations.

The new principles will be announced at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), to be held in June in Rio de Janeiro, 20 years after the 1992 Earth Summit took place there.

According to the project’s web site, these principles will represent “a landmark contribution and long-term commitment of the global insurance industry to building a sustainable global economy.”

UNEP FI and FELABAN are carrying out research on the current state of sustainable banking in Latin America, which aims to describe strengths and opportunities and identify good practices and ways of improving sustainability.

The study is focused on the commitment of financial institutions to sustainable development, the vision and policies that support this commitment, and environmental regulations.

The research also takes into account the commitment to sustainability in the operations of the different banks in relation to environmental and social risks, the management of internal resources and the development of green products and services.

UNEP has proposed that the goals of Rio+20 are to renew political commitment to sustainable development, to assess progress towards the targets internationally agreed upon at the Earth Summit two decades ago, and to address new and emerging challenges.

The conference will also focus on creating a green economy in the context of poverty eradication and sustainable development, as well as an institutional framework for that purpose.

“We can achieve a sustainable model for loans that is environmentally responsible. We need a fair and just model for global credit,” said Rea, of Bond for International Development.

By Stanley Kwenda
JOHANNESBURG, Jul 7 2010 (IPS)

The Mozambican government has adopted various policies to address the effects of climate change, with special attention to women as studies show that they are more adversely affected by this phenomenon.

The south-east African country, with its coastline of 2,700 km stretching along the Indian Ocean, has increasingly been subjected to environmental disasters over the past decade.

The government’s policies aim to reduce the number of victims and the loss of property; developing a culture of disaster prevention; and developing the means to mitigate and prevent disasters. It also aims to boost environmental management. The policies have a particular gender focus.

One such policy is the ministry for coordination of the environment’s national adaptation programme of action (NAPA), developed as part of the United Nations (UN) initiative to assist least developed countries in coping with climate change.

Projects are prioritised that will assist Mozambique in buffering itself against adverse environmental effects. These projects are recommended for funding under the Global Environment Facility of the UN.

“Most women, about 73 percent, work the land in Mozambique and are therefore hard hit by the effects of climate change,” according to William Antonio Ndlovu, programme officer with the Maputo-based Diakonia Mozambique, in an interview with IPS. He stressed that more should be done to assist women.

Diakonia Mozambique is a Christian development organisation working towards sustainable improvement in the living conditions of vulnerable people.

Julio Fernando of the Christian Council of Mozambique told IPS that the effects of climate change represent a growing threat to livelihoods in his country. “Many Mozambicans are at risk but women are affected more. This is mainly because of poor responsive measures,” said Fernando.

The Christian Council of Mozambique is part of a network of faith-based organisations working on socio-economic issues, among others.

Research by the Cape Town-based office of the Heinrich Böll Foundation Southern Africa confirms that “women and men are differently impacted upon by climate changes due to current power relations and their differentiated roles in these communities,” as Dr. Natasha Ribeiro, researcher of the study, put it in the report, titled “Gender and Climate Change: Mozambique Case Study”.

The foundation is associated with the German Green Party.

The reasons are that, “women have access to but not control over natural resources and other property rights. Additionally, women do most of the reproductive and part of the productive work, while men are only responsible for productive work”.

The study, published earlier in 2010, was conducted in the Gaza province located in the south of the country. It focused on the Mapai Ngale, a community vulnerable to droughts, and Magondzwene, vulnerable to floods since the year 2000.

It was found that droughts, strong winds and environmental degradation have caused women and men to spend more time working in agriculture to gain the same or lower yields than in previous years.

According to the report, communities are forced to change their way of life with women taking up more productive work as successive droughts over the past eight years caused men to look for jobs elsewhere. Women now work in alcohol brewing and selling as well as in fisheries.

This results in an increased burden on women who still look after the children, do domestic work and care for people living with AIDS and tuberculosis. Men still do not engage in reproductive work.

Men’s migration has enhanced women’s participation in decision-making structures as they are drawn into such structures to fill the gaps left by the migrating men.

Adaptation also involves finding alternative food sources and cultivating dry season’s vegetables, such as pumpkin, lettuce and tomatoes, all year round.

The study recommends that, due to women’s key role in communities, they always be considered as the priority group in any activity planned to ameliorate the effects of climate change. Special attention should be paid to women’s representation in decision-making structures and to capacity building in agriculture as women predominate in this sector.

A CARE International report on climate change similarly concluded in 2006 that climate change has the most impact on women in countries such as Zimbabwe, Malawi, Swaziland and Zambia. “As the main natural resource managers, the adverse effects of climate change are likely to be felt disproportionately by women,” the CARE report concluded. CARE is an international relief organisation.

According to a Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) developed by the Mozambican government in 2006, the country is unlikely to meet the millennium development goals (MDGs) due to the effects of climate change. This is further made worse by the extreme poverty that already exists in Mozambique.

The country has also tried to integrate climate concerns in its Agenda 2025 programme, essentially a development programme that the government of Mozambique aims to actualise by the year 2025.

It also developed a gender strategy for the agrarian sector. The strategy aims at creating equal access to resources and opportunities between men and women. In addition it urges the implementation of programmes for diversification of subsistence crops and access to improved technologies, including agro-processing, in response to climate change.

The Böll study praises NAPA and the agrarian strategy as solid instruments but say that they still need to be implemented.

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By Isolda Agazzi
GENEVA, Jun 1 2010 (IPS)

Technology transfer and aid for trade could assist least developed countries (LDCs) suffering the effects of climate change. But negotiations in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) are not helping to make this a reality, while aid for trade lands up at the wrong institutions, such as the World Bank.

Ancharaz: To force African countries to access climate change money through conditional World Bank loans is unfair as they did not cause the problem. Credit:

“Fisherpersons in Lake Victoria have three elements at their disposal: fishing gear, fish in the lake and access to markets.

“They are affected both by trade and climate change. To help them adapt to climate change, one can give them other possibilities to earn their livelihood and that’s where trade could help,” said Rashid Kaukab, deputy director of the Consumer Unity and Trust Society (CUTS).

“The effect of trade can be positive if they have access to international markets and use their earnings to buy a bigger boat, or negative, if the EU imposes a new standard that makes them lose their market access,” argued Kaukab. CUTS is an Indian-based nongovernmental organisation (NGO) working on international trade and other issues.

The problem is that climate change and trade are rarely analysed in relation to each other. For example, Uganda has a national adaptation plan of action to fight climate change and a national export strategy but the latter barely mentions climate change, added Kaukab.

Kaukab was speaking at a roundtable discussion organised by the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD) on May 28 in Geneva. ICTSD is a Geneva-based NGO using dialogue on trade policies to promote sustainable development.

Theoretically, multilateral trade liberalisation should provide access to better technology, which is a critical element of ameliorating climate change, said Debapriya Bhattacharya, special advisor on LDCs at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD).

“But technology is subject to intellectual property regulations. Under the WTO’s Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS) agreement, transfer of technology could not be put into operation and therefore remains hostage to trade negotiations. The Doha Round could provide a solution if it truly addressed development but negotiations have not gone further.”

For the UNCTAD official, border adjustment taxes try to “level the playing field” between polluter and non-polluter countries “but there is a strong concern that they may be protectionist. Standards and eco-labelling are also suspect because they may create the barriers we are trying to avoid,” he added.

Border adjustment taxes are levied by carbon-taxing countries on goods manufactured and imported from non-carbon-taxing countries.

Vinaye Ancharaz, senior lecturer in economics at the University of Mauritius, believes that aid for trade funds could be used to top up funds set aside for climate change. Aid for trade was launched in 2005 to help developing countries build economic infrastructure and productive capacities, among others.

In 2007, Africa received 9.5 billion dollars in aid for trade, which represented a 38 percent increase over 2000-2005. “This is good because African countries are the least integrated in the world economy,” argued Ancharaz.

“However, Ethiopia, which is the biggest recipient of aid for trade on the continent and fifth in the world, got only one dollar in terms of per capita aid. So there is a need to significantly increase aid for trade.”

A whole range of bilateral and multilateral funds are available to fight climate change. Of special interest to Africa is the LDCs Fund, operated by the UN as part of the Global Environment Facility.

“However, there are only 180 million dollars in the fund presently, which is very little compared to the adaptation needs of African countries, of which the estimated cost is 588 million dollars,” Ancharaz pointed out.

The EU has pledged to provide additional money over the next three years. “But where will this money go?” the Mauritian academic asked. “I bet very little will reach the LDCs fund.

“Most of it will go to the World Bank and will be available as loans, which is unfair because African countries have contributed very little to climate change but they are the most vulnerable to it. It is immoral for these countries to have to borrow to adapt to problems that are not of their making,” Ancharaz insisted.

Regarding how aid for trade could top up under-endowed climate change funds, he gave the example of many African countries needing to shift to crops that are more weather resistant. Countries can ask for money under aid for trade to develop such crops and also to move out of agriculture. “With climate change you cannot depend only from agriculture,” he added.

“Soil rehabilitation and changes in crop mix can all be marked as building productive capacities in terms of aid for trade.”

The same goes for the water stress resulting from climate change: “You need to build dams and water distribution networks and manage scarce water resources more efficiently. All this can be included as economic infrastructure under aid for trade,” said Ancharaz.

For him, there is a need to promote complementarities and existing synergies, particularly since he considers the climate change adaptation projects as more strongly owned by African countries than the aid for trade projects that mainly flow in a bilateral mode on the basis of the World Bank’s poverty reduction strategy programmes.

One solution, he argued, may be to create a centralised fund for aid for trade, as initially advocated by economics Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz and the World Bank.

But Frans Lammersen, principal administrator at the development cooperation directorate of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which represents rich states, strongly objected that “we should not create a global fund for aid for trade that would only result in one more costly bureaucracy.

“Aid for trade is in line with the Paris Declaration on Aid Effectiveness; it has created its own accountability mechanism. It is about mainstreaming trade in development. It is very much country-owned because sectors are chosen by recipient governments.”

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By Alma Balopi
GABORONE, May 29 2010 (IPS)

The welcome end to wars in the upper reaches of the Okavango River brings new pressures for development and the risk of unwelcome changes to the health of the river. A joint commission to manage the basin is developing tools to avoid this.

Mokoro dugouts in the Okavango Delta: the Okavango River Commission must meet development needs upstream while protecting water quality downstream. Credit: Wikicommons

Population and development along the Okavango River were long held in check by Namibia’s war of liberation from apartheid South Africa, and decades of civil war in Angola.

Since Namibia’s independence in 1990, several proposals for water use ranging from dams for irrigation and power generation to a canal to transport water to distant urban centres threatened by drought have been put forward. And as Angola’s oil-rich government turns its attention to rural development, it’s likely that other ambitious projects will be put on the table.

The three countries established the Permanent Okavango River Basin Commission (OKACOM) in 1994, charged with working out the safe long-term yield of the basin and laying out criteria for fair allocation and sustainable use of the water.

The completion of a Transboundary Diagnostic Analysis (TDA), presented at OKACOM’s annual meeting in Gaborone on May 27, is an important milestone towards developing a strategic plan for the river basin.

The TDA is a careful scientific and technical assessment of the Okavango – looking at water quantity and quality, the characteristics of ecosystems all along the river, as well as the needs and nature of the communities, politics and institutions the river connects.

Dr Jackie King, a consultant from Cape Town-based research firm Water Matters, explained that if the effects of development along the river are clearly articulated by water managers, engineers and economists, it will enable decision-makers to better understand, for example, how a dam might supply water for irrigation and generate electric power, while altering seasonal flows and harming breeding of important animal species in a downstream wetland.

“We may lose a whole series of ecosystem services like fisheries. We may lose functions of the wetlands like purification of water and we lose the income that people along the river gained,” King said.

In preparing the analysis of the Okavango, several water resource scenarios were developed, with OKACOM identifying specific irrigation, hydroelericity and water abstraction projects. The decision was taken not to approach planning from the viewpoint of maximising one sector or another, but of presenting development scenarios of low, medium and high water use.

“Low water use scenarios do not mean lower standards of living,” said King. “You can have high standards of living with low water use if developments go in different directions. There are ways of improving the water use with low water use.”

King said the frequently poor soils found in the Okavango Basin might suggest that removing large volumes of water for irrigated agriculture was not optimal use of the resource.

Another concern that establishing more extensive agriculture in the Okavango’s catchment area raises is the risk of fertiliser running into the river – if additional nutrient runoff reached the delta, the papyrus reeds that are a dynamic part of the delta’s constantly shifting channels could grow far more rapidly, choking off huge sections.

A dam, even if it were operated to mimic the seasonal flow of water, would prevent sediment from reaching the Delta; without the many thousands of tonnes of sand carried into the Delta each year, wetland channels would tend to become deeper and faster, rather than silting up to create habitat for birds and aquatic life.

The TDA is the basis for the elaboration of a Strategic Action Plan for the Okavango. According to Chaminda Rajapakse, project manager for the Environmental Protection and Sustainable Management of the Okavango River Basin Project (EPSMO), the plan will improve the living standards of people in all three countries through coordinated development while maintaining the environmental integrity of the Okavango River Basin.

“The proposal looked at the basin a whole on where the best places for investment within the basin for best profits and appropriate markets,” Rajapakse explained. EPSMO – funded by the Global Environment Facility in support of OKACOM – was responsible for the TDA.

“OKACOM will establish an accurate monitoring system. Right now there are huge gaps in the monitoring of the information and systems will have to established (to monitor) river sediment and assess of ground water,” he said.

Opportunities for river-friendly wealth creation would have to be identified for communities. This would include developing and executing a programme to promote a basin-wide tourism product, improved livelihoods through sustainable agriculture, a pilot project to demonstrate best practices in livestock management, and training to help maintain sustainable fisheries and expand aquaculture production.

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By Daniela Estrada and Danilo Valladares
ROCHA, Uruguay, May 28 2010 (IPS)

A wide range of strategies are being followed in the southeastern Uruguayan province of Rocha to counteract the environmental damages of activities like soy cultivation, plantation forestry and tourism. But challenges abound.

Pindo palm nursery in Rocha, Uruguay. Credit: Daniela Estrada/IPS

The aim is to strengthen the National System of Protected Areas (SNAP), set up in 2000, and on implementing projects financed by the Global Environment Facility (GEF) Small Grants Programme.

The project reinforcing SNAP — which depends on Uruguay’s Ministry of Housing, Land Planning and the Environment — is being implemented by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) with funding from GEF.

GEF was created in 1991 by the World Bank but was restructured in 1994 and became a permanent, separate institution that currently brings together 181 countries. It is the world’s largest environmental fund, a partnership with the private sector, civil society organisations and 10 international agencies.

Four of the seven national protected areas in Uruguay are in Rocha: the Cabo Polonio National Park, the Rocha Lagoon Protected Landscape, the Santa Teresa National Park, and Cerro Verde e Islas de la Coronilla. Four other areas are currently in the process of becoming national parks, and seven more have been proposed.

Uruguay’s big environmental problem “is the transformation of the country’s main ecosystem, temperate grasslands,” due to the spread of soybean crops and plantation forests of pine and eucalyptus, Laura García, technical coordinator of the “project for strengthening the implementation” of SNAP, told IPS.

“Soy cultivation is not regulated in the least,” said García. “Over the past five or six years, the companies involved in soy production have been coming in and offering high rents to lease land, which they don’t even buy, and then they leave the soil depleted,” she added.

Gerardo Ebia, director of the non-governmental Programme for the Protection of Biodiversity and Development, which coordinates the environmental actions of the different actors involved in Rocha, told IPS that in Uruguay, “soy cultivation has expanded from a few thousand hectares in the 1990s to 600,000 hectares today.”

In the specific case of the Rocha Lagoon, the greatest threats are “pressure to build tourism infrastructure along the shores of the lake, the modification and fragmentation of natural systems by agriculture, and the irrational use of areas along the rivers,” Ebia said.

The shallow coastal lagoon that has a surface area of 72 sq km is home to more than 200 species of migratory and native birds, including gulls, herons, plovers and terns and endangered species like the coscoroba swan, the world’s smallest swan.

But SNAP covers less than one percent of the national territory in this country of 3.3 million people.

Perhaps the best-known protected area in Rocha is the Cabo Polonio National Park, where a small fishing village only accessible by horseback or four-wheel-drive vehicles is set among shifting sand dunes up to 20 metres high and colonies of southern sea lions.

But preservation of natural areas in this country of rolling plains and low hills is complicated by the fact that 90 percent of land in Uruguay is in private hands.

“This is a huge challenge for conservation: getting the private sector involved at the same time that public policies are being implemented to bolster production, including agribusiness,” said García.

To prevent the protected areas from becoming isolated “islands,” the “new minister of Livestock, Agriculture and Fisheries, Tabaré Aguerre, is working on designing conservation measures, but in collaboration with farmers and other productive sectors themselves,” she said.

One of the efforts undertaken to safeguard threatened ecosystems is a project by the non-governmental Grupo Palmar, which has received support from GEF’s Small Grants Programme to save the slow-growing Pindo palm tree (Butiá capitata), which is native to Uruguay and southern Brazil.

“This palm tree has a major problem regenerating itself,” Sandra Bazzani, national coordinator of the Small Grants Programme in Uruguay, told IPS. “We have 70,000 hectares of Butiá palm, but they are all fully grown trees, because the livestock in that cattle-ranching area eats the young sprouts.

“Although GEF has financed efforts in the area for years, and studies have been carried out, it’s very difficult to convince the cattle-ranchers to keep the livestock away from the trees,” she said.

“A system in which the pasture lands are compatible with protection of the palm trees has not yet been achieved,” she added.

The Grupo Palmar received 17,000 dollars from the GEF in 2006 to build an information centre for visitors, a nursery, and a small park of Pindo palm trees in Rocha.

“The fruit of the palm trees is used to make jams, preserved fruits, liquor and sweet-and-sour sauces, and the palm fronds are used to make baskets,” Bazzani said. “The idea is to help people understand that if we preserve the species, it can be a source of income.”

The Small Grants Programme’s worldwide budget will be between 300 and 350 million dollars for the 2010-2014 period, not including local co-financing, the Programme’s global manager Delfin Ganapin told IPS.

The budget was confirmed at the Fourth GEF Assembly held this week in the resort town of Punta del Este, sometimes described as the St. Tropez of Uruguay.

A total of 1.2 million dollars in Small Grants Programme funds have gone so far towards financing 59 projects in Uruguay, Bazzani explained.

Strengthening national systems of protected areas and adopting more environmentally-friendly practices by farmers and other producers are enormous challenges throughout Latin America, Helen Negret, UNDP regional technical adviser on biodiversity and land degradation for Latin America and the Caribbean, told IPS.

At the tenth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, to be held in Japan next October, the UNDP will present a study on the financial sustainability of national systems of protected areas in 20 countries in this region, and another on the economic value of biodiversity.

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By Danilo Valladares and Daniela Estrada
PUNTA DEL ESTE, Uruguay, May 27 2010 (IPS)

Providing technology to communities to ensure food security doesn’t work if local traditions and social dynamics are not taken into account, concluded the participants in a forum here at the Fourth Assembly of the Global Environment Facility.

In Petrolina, a town in Brazil’s Northeast region, “they purchased technology packages to produce banana and onion, and they failed because there was no technical assistance or follow-up,” Espedito Rufino de Araújo told IPS. He is the director of the Dom Helder Camara Project, under the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

“They tried to apply methods that came from elsewhere and were unknown to the local people,” said Araújo, referring to a government initiative for the San Francisco and Paraíba valleys, which included collaboration from international organisations.

He said this is a common occurrence. Agricultural technology packages are distributed to communities “to fight the food crisis” and are intended to be sustainable with the environment and local natural resources, but often end in failure.

“For example, in the Northeast of Brazil we have 110 different geo- environmental areas. One can’t distribute the same package to the 110 sites that have different cultures and socio-environmental conditions,” he said in an interview after participating in a panel discussion entitled “Can we feed the world and safeguard the environment?”

The discussion took place as part of the Fourth Assembly of the GEF, which was created in 1991 by the World Bank and is the world’s largest funder of projects to improve the global environment.

Delegates from the 181 GEF member countries and from more than 400 non- governmental organisations gathered May 24-26 in the Uruguayan resort city of Punta del Este to conduct its fifth round of fund renewal and to determine the priorities for the next four years.

One of the top issues in the Assembly’s various events was precisely the relationship between food security and environmental protection.

The world’s agricultural production must increase 70 percent in order to feed the 9 billion people projected to inhabit the planet by 2050, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). But agriculture relies on limited natural resources and has a heavy impact on ecosystems.

According to the forum, given this context it is essential to develop and disseminate new techniques as well as recuperate traditional methods.

One example cited in the discussion was an innovative irrigation system developed in the Middle East: a network of surface pipeline that can use almost any type of water, whether fresh, salty or contaminated. The British multinational firm Design Technology & Irrigation designed the system in collaboration with IFAD and the government of Jordan, a country that is 75 percent desert.

“Our position is not against technology transfer, but rather one that favours a more participatory relationship. We have to do this with technical assistance, research, follow-up, and a demonstration so that the farmers can incorporate the necessary knowledge,” Araújo said.

José Luis Tuquinga, a “chakarero” (an indigenous agricultural wise man), works on the Runa Kawsay Project in Ecuador to empower indigenous organisations to recuperate their traditional products. Too often, he said, technology transfer is forced upon the communities.

Tuquinga explained that the way of life of the indigenous peoples “is a system linked to the protection of Pachamama (Mother Earth). The use of pesticides and inputs inappropriate for the earth doesn’t work.”

In the project, financed by GEF and carried out by FAO, utilises millennia-old knowledge and methods and locally produced organic fertilisers to bring back traditional foods like oca (a tuber) and quinoa (a high-protein grain).

The project’s national coordinator, Marco Vivar, told IPS that many technical manuals have been drafted in Ecuador, but sometimes they don’t work.

“In a trip I made through more than 200 communities, I didn’t find even one indigenous person using this. So then the question becomes: What are we doing and how?” he said.

In his opinion, technical assistance should be used to complement the work already being done at the local level.

“The idea is to respect local dynamics and complement what is needed in order to improve. It may sound like a basic principle, but it’s complicated to implement,” he said.

The latest increase in GEF funds means greater possibilities for expanding technology transfer, according to Charles Riemenschneider, director of FAO’s investment centre. At the Punta del Este meet, the delegates agreed a 52- percent hike in GEF funds, bringing the total to 4.25 billion dollars available for the next four-year period.

GEF provides resources to developing countries and transition economies for projects related to conservation, climate change, international waters, soil degradation, and persistent organic pollutants.

The GEF Assembly, which wrapped up its sessions on Wednesday, formally agreed to serve as the financial instrument of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, adopted in 1994.

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By Danilo Valladares
PUNTA DEL ESTE, Uruguay, May 25 2010 (IPS)

“There should be a mechanism for recipient countries to help bring about a more balanced distribution of GEF funds,” Cuban delegate Jorge Luis Fernández told IPS after a forum Tuesday on how to boost the efficiency and effectiveness of the Global Environment Facility.

Uruguayan Vice President Danilo Astori addressing the Fourth GEF Assembly. Credit: Ana Libisch/IPS

The Cuban delegate said that “today the allocation of funds is biased in favour of promoting and facilitating the complementation of the interests of rich countries, while the solutions to our problems in the areas of poverty and education are not covered by the funds made available by the GEF.”

The GEF, which was created in 1991 by the World Bank and is now made up of 181 countries, is the world’s largest funder of projects to improve the global environment.

At the current assembly, held for the first time in Latin America, donor countries have pledged 4.25 billion dollars to finance GEF activities over the next four years, 52 percent more than the total promised in the last replenishment of funds in 2006.

Fernández said the GEF Assembly, which meets every three or four years, should be given greater influence, since all of the member countries are represented, and that the Council, which reaches concrete decisions by consensus and meets twice a year, besides virtual gatherings, should be given less power.

In the Assembly, “a larger number of countries are represented individually and we are in a better position to negotiate, while we are under-represented on the Council,” said the Cuban representative.

In the 32-seat Council, 16 are reserved for developing countries, 14 for donor countries and two for nations with economies in transition, even though the majority of the GEF member countries are developing nations.

“We believe we should work together in the GEF, not only from the perspective of the donor countries, which up to now has prevailed in all of the restructurings and rules on its functioning,” Fernández said.

Although one of the GEF’s flagship initiatives is the Small Grants Programme (SGP), implemented by a network of more than 400 civil society organisations, it represents less than one percent of the GEF budget.

“The SGP is the best GEF programme, but it receives the least money, although it is aimed at resolving people’s structural problems,” said Fernández. “That is one of the reasons that there is no balance between donors and recipients.”

Guatemalan Deputy Minister of Natural Resources Enma Díaz told IPS that if recipient countries had a greater voice in the GEF’s decision-making processes, more funds would be distributed to programmes that benefit them.

Greater influence would allow initiatives like the SGP to be expanded in terms of funding and coverage, she said.

“It’s a mutually beneficial relationship,” said Díaz. “Donors require good management on the part of the countries, and the governments’ area of activity is the national territory. A symbiosis between recipients and donors will bring about better management.”

Jorge Rucks, the head of Uruguay’s environmental agency, DINAMA, told IPS that it is important to find mechanisms to allow countries to have greater input, and that the Assembly is the most participative and open place to do that within the GEF.

The official complained about the limited participation by recipient countries, despite the fact that they will endure the severest effects of climate change caused mainly by industrialised countries. “And we (the recipients) have to find a way to cope, through adaptation strategies,” he said.

Enrique Maruri, the delegate of Colombia’s Foreign Ministry, said it should be recipient nations, not donor countries, that design the projects. “We must make the projects our own,” he said.

The director of the UNESCO Regional Office of Science for Latin America and the Caribbean, Jorge Grandi, said the sense that each nation is responsible for and in charge of the projects is key to the functioning of any fund.

The UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) official underlined the opportunity to debate these needs in Punta del Este.

The calls for a greater voice expressed by Latin American governments came on top of Monday’s demands by civil society organisations for more funds and less red tape.

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By Daniela Estrada and Danilo Valladares
PUNTA DEL ESTE, Uruguay, May 24 2010 (IPS)

Civil society organisations called for more funds, less bureaucracy and greater decision-making power, at the opening of the Fourth Global Environment Facility (GEF) Assembly Monday in this Uruguayan resort town.

Yolanda Contreras, weaving traditional cotton from Peru. Credit: Ana Libisch/IPS

Delegates from the NGOs also called for a greater voice in the design of national programmes financed by the GEF, which was created in 1991 by the World Bank but was restructured in 1994 and became a permanent, separate institution that currently brings together 181 countries.

More than 30 countries pledged 4.25 billion dollars in donations to finance the GEF over the next four years, 52 percent more than the total in the fourth replenishment of funds in 2006, GEF CEO Monique Barbut said.

But the civil society organisations were calling for 10 billion dollars.

The amount pledged by donors “will always be insufficient,” María Liechner, head of the Fundación Ecos of Uruguay, which was founded in 1994 and forms part of the GEF NGO Network, told IPS.

The representatives of the GEF member countries, meeting this week in Punta del Este, on the Atlantic coast 140 km east of the Uruguayan capital, will decide on the environmental financing priorities for the 2010-2014 period.

Liechner said the NGOs want “to form part of the projects from the planning stage, and to be taken into account when it comes to decision-making. But this is not the case today.”

The GEF, the world’s largest environmental fund, is a partnership with the private sector, NGOs, and 10 international agencies: the U.N. Development Programme; the U.N. Environment Programme; the World Bank; the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation; the U.N. Industrial Development Organisation; the African Development Bank; the Asian Development Bank; the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development; the Inter-American Development Bank; and the International Fund for Agricultural Development.

It provides grants to developing countries and economies in transition for projects related to biodiversity, climate change, international waters, land degradation, the ozone layer, and persistent organic pollutants.

“There’ s a big issue of cultural understanding,” Minnie Degawan, head of the Indigenous Peoples Network for Change (IPNC), told IPS. “The GEF looks at indigenous people as just a small sector and it treats them like it treats all the others. It does not recognise that indigenous people have different ways of doing things. So there’s a lot of educating that needs to be done with the GEF.”

The IPNC emerged to respond to the need for indigenous peoples to effectively participate in international processes that have a direct impact on their daily lives, with particular attention to the GEF and the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), signed in 1992. The IPNC involves groups in Asia, Africa and the Americas.

Degawan said the GEF “want to just deal with biodiversity and they don’t want to deal with climate change; they want to always keep them separate. But indigenous people do not look at it that way; we always see things as interconnected.”

She also complained about the red tape involved in applying for GEF funds. “After three years of working on this project funded by the GEF, I think I have more white hair. They require so many things and sometimes it’s just repeating itself, like you have to fill in this form, and you fill in this form, and it’s basically the same.”

In addition, she said the funds for projects involving indigenous communities are still insufficient.

“In the last period, GEF grants (for the Small Grants Programme) totalled 110 million dollars, and this time that amount was increased to 220 million dollars – in other words, there was a 100 percent increase,” without counting the funds that each country can earmark from its national action plan, William Ehlers, GEF Team Leader for External Relations, told IPS.

One change projected for this four-year period is the release of funding for new countries interested in joining the global partnership, said Ehlers.

Indigenous activist Yolanda Contreras with the Asociación de Artesanas de Arbolso y Huaca de Barro, an NGO from northwestern Peru, told IPS that the funds that reach native communities through the Small Grants Programme are still insignificant.

Financing of the Small Grants Programme is less than one percent of the total GEF budget, which has allocated more than nine billion dollars to over 2,600 projects in 165 countries since it was created.

Contreras, whose project receives technical assistance from the GEF for growing and weaving native varieties of naturally coloured cotton, acknowledged the importance of that support, pointing out that “the tradition of our ancestors was being lost. We didn’t have seeds to plant the cotton.”

In the meeting with the civil society groups, Small Grants Programme Global Manager Delfin Ganapin recognised that there are many challenges in terms of facilitating access to funding by local communities, increasing the budget, improving training, and overcoming cultural and language barriers.

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By Diana Cariboni
MONTEVIDEO, May 24 2010 (IPS)

The world’s multilateral credit institutions have often faced the criticism that they cause more problems than they prevent. As the challenges increase, such as those posed by climate change, the debate is shifting to environmental financing.

Villagers in Shamva, Zimbabwe, test a prototype of a water pump and tank for irrigating their gardens. Credit: Vusumuzi Sifile/IPS

Shamva, an area in northern Zimbabwe, was known decades ago for its tobacco, maize, cotton, beans and coffee, which grew without using irrigation. But there is less and less rain, and rivers have dried up, in part due to deforestation.

Although the last harvest left many dinner plates empty, Shamva was not on the national list of those in need of food aid “because of the general perception that Shamva is an agriculturally productive area,” local activist Isaac Chidavaenzi told Tierramérica.

In November 2008, Chidavaenzi launched the Chengaose Foundation Trust to dig wells, and obtained 50,000 dollars through GEF’s Small Grants Programme, ultimately benefitting 7,000 villagers in the Madziwa area of Shamva, in Mashonaland Central Province.

With the initial funds, many dug their wells. But due to delays in the required reports from the Chengaose Trust, the local partner, the GEF did not release the remaining 20,000 dollars, which were necessary to install pumps, tanks and pipelines to irrigate the villagers’ gardens.

“I have water, but the problem is how to take it to the garden,” said Goodreach Masuku, one of the farmers who met May 10 with the GEF/SGP officials.

More and more people want to have their water well, said Khethiwe Mhlanga, national GEF/SGP coordinator. “Ours is a pilot project that should show the way for many others to copy and follow… but there is a real struggle to keep within those numbers,” she told Tierramérica.

In the last three years, the GEF/SGP has assisted 30 communities in Zimbabwe, spending 1.2 million dollars — not much for a country of 11.4 million people submerged for years in agricultural and institutional crises.

The Small Grants Programme handles less then one percent of the money from GEF, the leading international financial organisation dedicated to the environment. The Facility was created by the World Bank in 1991, when that institution was battered by criticism for promoting environmentally destructive investments.

Today, “even the fierce critics of GEF think it is wonderful,” Zoe Young, author of the 2002 book “A New Green Order? The World Bank and the Politics of the Global Environment Facility,” told Tierramérica in a phone interview.

The money “is going to small local groups who know the locations, know what needs to be done for particular conservation efforts, and that money is working,” she said, but added that it has not been an efficient financing model when it involves billions of dollars.

Far from Zimbabwe, in the Caribbean island nation of Cuba, a biodiversity protection programme received 10 million dollars from the GEF, distributed since 1993 amongst three projects.

The focus is the Camagüey Savanna Ecosystem, which covers 19,000 square kilometres of watersheds and more than 2,500 small islands, or keys, along the north coast. The area is home to 2.3 million people.

The aim of the project is to harmonise tourism, farming, forestry and fishing, without damaging the rich local environment. In addition to the GEF, there are contributions from the Cuban government, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), Canadian cooperation and the Worldwide Fund for Nature, UN official Gricel Acosta told Tierramérica.

Mangroves, marine grasslands and coral reefs, with an abundance of endemic species, are emblematic of the area. After 17 years, the initiative is in its third phase, and what has been learned can be applied in other areas, said researcher María Elena Perdomo, of the Environmental Research and Services Centre, in Villa Clara province.

Perdomo told Tierramérica that she values “the capacities to deepen knowledge about the resources and help in the search for alternatives for the sustainable use of biodiversity.”

According to Maria Athena Ballesteros, of the World Resources Institute, for countries like Mexico and those from the Caribbean that are adopting low- carbon production models, the GEF “should consider meeting the initial high costs of those low-carbon options.”

For example, “Mexico is supporting a sustainable transport initiative. They would probably benefit from some grant money to support human, institutional, and technical capacity,” Ballesteros said.

“The question is, does GEF have the capacity to back the most promising technologies in developing countries, to support policy innovations and investments towards real transformation, which is what is necessary to stop climate change?” Ballesteros said.

When money is limited, tough choices have to be made.

To date, the GEF has provided 8.7 billion dollars in grants for more than 2,400 environmental projects in 165 developing countries and emerging economies. The funds pledged for the next four years total 4.25 billion dollars, less than half what is considered necessary by the North American network of non-governmental organisations accredited by the Facility.

But from another perspective, the problem isn’t money.

Do we really need a global financial institution to fund efforts to confront problems like climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification?

“These are serious problems… Money would help, yes, and some action is needed, but my answer is no,” said Zoe Young.

When the GEF was created, “it was a proposal that environmental expertise should go into shaping every project of the World Bank and of all the international public finance entities,” she said.

“If you took these billions of dollars and all these experts and used them to establish international regulation for energy efficiency, industrial standards, multinational energy companies, safe emissions levels… so many people could benefit,” said Young.

In her view, creating a climate change fund is a futile effort. “If you have good standards for all the investments and the public money goes to setting those standards, then you don’t need all these strange inventions like carbon market and carbon offsetting” for greenhouse gas emissions, she said.

But the GEF exists and has been gaining influence since it became independent of the World Bank in 1994, though the Bank is still responsible for its administration.

Today the GEF is the economic instrument of the UN conventions on climate change, persistent organic pollutants, biodiversity and desertification, among other functions.

* Ephraim Nsingo (Harare), Matthew Cardinale (Atlanta) and Patricia Grogg (Havana) contributed reporting. 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.

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