Climate Change and Poverty guide
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» Climate Change: Country Briefings
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| Low-lying West Point slum, Monrovia © Tugela Ridley / IRIN News |
In dithering over international climate negotiations, rich governments turn a blind eye to the impact of global warming on the world’s poorest households. The daily struggle to cope with marginal resources of food, water and energy is undermined by increasingly unstable climate patterns for which responsibility lies far away. This moral predicament demands a rapid global transition to low carbon economics together with significant financial and technical support for developing countries.
updated August 2011
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» Climate Change: Country Briefings
Poverty Reduction
Climate change impedes the fight against global poverty because poor people tend to live in the most vulnerable locations and lack resources to adapt. For example, the river deltas of Bangladesh and Burma are densely populated by poor households increasingly exposed to cyclones and tidal surges.
In sub-Saharan Africa, populations are predominantly rural, dependent on rain-fed agriculture for subsistence and livelihoods. Poor families are ill-equipped to respond to changing rainfall patterns and the shorter growing season caused by warmer days and nights.
Strategies to achieve UN targets for global poverty reduction, known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), are therefore being stabbed in the back by climate change. The International Food Policy Research Institute has estimated that, by 2050, the effects of climate change on agriculture will add 25 million children to the total of those suffering from malnutrition.
Nonetheless, global warming is rarely the sole cause of climate-related humanitarian distress in developing countries. Mismanagement of soil and water resources, typical in poor farming environments, invariably plays a role. For example, overgrazing contributes to desertification. Both climate change and local deforestation have been identified as underlying causes of devastating floods in Pakistan in 2010.
Environmental journalist Daniel Grossman talks to PBS NewsHour about Mongolia, where temperature is rising much faster than the global average and where poverty limits the ability to adapt.
Climate Justice
According to the WorldWatch Institute, the world’s richest 500 million people (roughly 7% of the population) are currently responsible for 50% of carbon dioxide emissions, while the poorest 3 billion are responsible for just 6%. In the period 1900-2004, the whole of Africa generated 2.5% of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions whilst the US accounted for 29.5%.
Although these gaps are narrowing, historic emissions are relevant because carbon dioxide remains in the atmosphere to exert a greenhouse effect for many decades. All assessments of vulnerability to climate change concur that the countries most seriously threatened are those which carry the least historical responsibility.
The concept of climate justice seeks to restore equity in two ways. Firstly, that richer countries should repay their climate debt by undertaking severe cuts in emissions, reserving “atmospheric space” for the growing emissions of poorer countries. Secondly, that they should provide financial support for low carbon transition and adaptation to the damaging effects of climate change.
These principles of climate justice are firmly enshrined in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This treaty was agreed at the Rio de Janeiro "Earth Summit" in 1992 with the ultimate objective of “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.”
The Convention demands application of the precautionary principle and that the scale of emission reductions should be assessed “in the light of the best available scientific information.” And international climate change laws must observe the Convention’s commitment to “common but differentiated responsibilities” between richer and poorer countries.
Developing countries feel that observance of these provisions has been grudging and inadequate. Their sense of grievance has been accentuated by the arbitrary adoption of two degrees as a tolerable temperature rise for the purpose of climate negotiations.
Most climate models predict that richer countries in temperate zones will benefit from higher crop yields within this range. By contrast, crops in tropical regions are already at their limit of temperature sensitivity.
Furthermore, the two degree figure is a global average – most parts of Africa will experience significantly higher increases. On the Tibetan plateau temperatures have been rising at double the global average over the last three decades, setting in motion the retreat of 90% of Himalayan glaciers.
Many small island states are unlikely to survive warming on the two degree scale, due to salinisation of water supplies and ultimate inundation by rising tides.
Desperately slow implementation of the UNFCCC vision has driven climate justice campaigners to refer increasingly to human rights law and to the legal principle of reparations for damages.
A link between climate change and extreme weather? Never. An ironic narrative by Bill McGibben, founder of 350.org, exposes how denial of global warming in the United States is impeding progress towards climate justice; from Plomomedia.
Kyoto Protocol
The Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997 as a supplement to the Framework Convention on Climate Change and eventually ratified in February 2005. Richer countries, known as “Annex 1 countries”, are subject to legally binding targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. In aggregate, these cuts seek a minimum 5% reduction in the 1990 level of all Annex 1 emissions before the end of a first commitment period in 2012.
However, the US refused to ratify the Protocol and has allowed its carbon dioxide emissions to increase between 1990 and 2010. Canada and Japan have largely disregarded their Kyoto commitments.
Furthermore, the detailed rules not only exclude emissions from aviation and shipping but also contain various loopholes. The concentration of manufacturing of consumer goods in countries which have no Kyoto Protocol targets is one reason why China has overtaken the US to become the world’s greatest emitter of carbon dioxide.
These shortcomings have allowed global emissions to mushroom. By 2009 they were 40% above the 1990 baseline and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now at its highest for at least 800,000 years.
The secretariat of the UNFCCC has been engaged for some years in seeking agreement to renew the Kyoto Protocol. In the 2007 Bali Action Plan, the Annex 1 countries acknowledged their legal obligation to negotiate a second commitment period from 2012, the US agreed to participate in a comparable and parallel negotiating track, and the developing countries agreed to reduce their trajectories of emissions growth, subject to financial and technical support.
The three subsequent UNFCCC annual conferences have witnessed a gradual retreat by the richer countries from the Bali Action Plan. Japan, Canada and Russia now openly oppose renewal of the Kyoto Protocol. And the US offer to reduce its emissions by only 3%-4% from a 1990 baseline by 2020 is not remotely comparable to other Annex 1 countries.
World carbon emissions figures for 2010 illustrate the failure of the Kyoto Protocol to achieve its goals, from Al Jazeera English.
Cancun Agreements
Countries opposed to the Kyoto Protocol want to abandon the UNFCCC principle of a global mitigation target based on science, divided up by agreement between countries, enforced by legal agreement. Instead, they advocate a “pledge and review” system in which countries offer independent targets, according to their circumstances.
This approach emerged in the Copenhagen Accord, the outcome of the 2009 conference. Countries making pledges now include emerging economies such as China and India whose targets will reduce the growth trajectory of their emissions.
The problem with this softer approach is that the pledges add up to barely half of the reductions recommended by scientists. The 2007 4th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) advised that cuts of 25%-40% by 2020 would be necessary to limit average temperature rise to two degrees. Efforts to persuade key countries to improve their pledges in order to fill the "emissions gap" have so far failed.
Developing countries now find themselves in a difficult position. They unanimously favour continuity of the Kyoto Protocol because it binds the big polluting countries to action necessary to fend off the damaging impact of global warming. However, if they refuse to compromise, they may be accused of collapsing the UN process which is the only international forum in which poor countries have an equal voice.
The Cancun Agreements, settled at the 2010 conference, cover a wide range of valuable subsidiary matters but the most important issues were deferred. There was no agreement on the scale of emissions reductions, the inclusion of aviation and shipping, the appropriate legal framework, or how to raise the finance promised to assist developing countries.
It seems probable that the UN climate conference in Durban in December 2011 may be forced to construct a stalling mechanism to sustain the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.
Global warming shows no inclination to synchronize its progress with prevaricating politicians. At the Cancun conference, the World Meteorological Organization announced that the decade ending in 2010 has been the hottest on record.
Right to Develop
A fundamental dilemma is how to cut global greenhouse gas emissions without denying the right of developing countries to industrialize their economies. Carbon dioxide emissions in Africa in 2009 were just 1.1 tonnes per capita compared with 17.7 tonnes in the US.
For example, there are 1.5 billion people who lack access to electricity. The UN has a target to meet this need in full by 2030, despite the potential 3% increase in global emissions.
The majority of these households currently meet their energy needs through the use of wood for fuel and charcoal, a major cause of deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions. The transition to more efficient energy use will therefore play a valuable dual role of poverty reduction and emissions mitigation.
Population growth - an obvious source of rising emissions - offers a similar example. Almost all projected growth in population will occur in developing countries. National population strategies which recognise the importance of women’s education and access to family planning will contribute not only to women’s rights but also to lower consumption of resources that contribute to climate change.
Environmentalists and poverty reduction campaigners have been slow to grasp this interdependence of their interests. The Cancun Agreements include acceptance by the poorer countries to develop their economies on a more efficient basis than “business as usual.” They have agreed to prepare “nationally appropriate mitigation actions” setting out their plans for low carbon development.
Adaptation
Practical measures which reduce vulnerability to the impact of climate change are described as "adaptation”. The concept betrays our failure to prevent global warming and that its consequences are unavoidable and imminent.
Scope for effective adaptation is determined by local adaptive capacity, a measure which exposes global inequality at its most extreme. Armed with their highly educated, healthy and skilled workforces, industrialised countries are already committing to defensive projects in anticipation of floods, coastal erosion and new patterns of agriculture. Price tags of hundreds of millions of dollars are no disincentive.
By contrast, countries facing short term imperatives of hunger and sickness are understandably reluctant to commit resources to an intangible environmental problem. The inability of climate models to generate accurate long term rainfall trends at local resolutions add to these unenviable dilemmas for decision-makers.
In light of these difficult circumstances, consensus is building that the most effective approach to adaptation is to promote climate-resilient and faster development. If communities are less poor and their livelihoods less vulnerable to unpredictable weather, their prospects for coping with change will be enhanced. As with emissions reduction, adaptation and development are two sides of the same coin.
For example, plans for diversifying agriculture or improving soil and water conservation already feature in food security programmes in poor countries. Provided the risk of climate variability is recognised in their design, then such programmes will fulfil agendas for both poverty reduction and adaptation to climate change.
An inevitable consequence of this approach is the considerable difficulty in separating out costs of climate adaptation from the costs of existing development goals. This partly accounts for the poor allocation of climate finance to adaptation projects.
The Cancun agreements seek to redress the balance in stating that “adaptation must be addressed with the same priority as mitigation.” The UN Human Development Report for 2007 priced adaptation in developing countries at $86 billion per annum, not far short of the current total of foreign aid.
Heather McGray, Senior Associate at the World Resources Institute, explains how to enable the rural poor to adapt to a changing climate.
Disaster Risk and Migration
It is important to recognise that adaptation to climate change has limits, beyond which disaster risk reduction becomes the appropriate proactive response. This is an increasingly prominent feature of development plans in poor countries.
Examples of risk reduction include the community shelters, public awareness programmes, raised roads and buildings, and early warning systems now familiar in the deltas of Bangladesh. These measures have already proved their worth in saving lives.
Meteorological stations have a vital role to play in providing climate data for forecasting and climate modelling. Many developing countries are seeking financial assistance to fill the gaps in their coverage.
Cost estimates of $15 billion for the destruction caused by the 2010 Pakistan floods have drawn attention to the rising cost of global warming. Although such events can only partly be attributed to climate change, the Cancun Agreements took the unprecedented step of establishing a work programme “to address loss and damage associated with climate change impacts in developing countries.”
The offer of climate risk insurance cover in regions where it might not be available on normal commercial terms, or in farming communities able to afford only very small premiums, is likely to be one strand of investigation.
The “slow onset” category of climate disaster, such as desertification or salinisation of soil and water resources, may ultimately render land unfit for human habitation, forcing migration in the last resort. The head of Indonesia’s delegation to UN climate change negotiations has said that 20 million people living in low-lying coastal regions might have to move within 15-20 years.
The extent to which climate change may lead to cross-border migration, as opposed to internal displacement, is speculative but rough estimates suggest a total of 200-250 million by 2050.
The UN Refugee Agency acknowledges that some degree of new international humanitarian protection should be provided but rejects the terminology of “climate refugees” out of concern for destabilising the long-established rights of political refugees.
Aid projects in Mozambique help farmers to cope with extreme weather, from UK Department of International Development
Deforestation and Climate Change
The IPCC 2007 Assessment estimated that deforestation contributes 17.4% of all greenhouse gas emissions, a higher figure than expected for a category omitted from the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol. The Bali conference of 2007 therefore encouraged research on how developing countries might be compensated financially for protecting their forests through a scheme now known as “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation” (REDD).
The approach addresses not just logging activities but also the clearance of forest peripheries for wood fuel, charcoal production and “slash and burn” agriculture.
REDD must find ways of replacing the value of these activities to poor rural communities and to safeguard the rights of indigenous groups whose livelihoods depend on the forest.
REDD pilot projects are under way in key forest countries to test whether safeguards can be effective and to explore logistical difficulties. These include the measurement of forest assets, the leakage risk that protection of one region will condemn the neighbouring forest to the loggers, and verification that deforestation has been reduced or stopped.
The Cancun Agreements endorse the REDD approach but defer difficult questions over a suitable mechanism for generating the necessary long term finance. Estimates suggest that costs of a complete end to deforestation by 2030 might approach $20 billion per annum.
It is broadly accepted that REDD could be one of the most efficient and cost effective ways of tackling climate change. However, the protracted nature of international climate negotiations has slowed momentum, allowing reservations to gain some traction.
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries from TVE Inspiring Change
Technology Transfer
The transfer of energy efficient technologies from rich to poor countries has an important role to play in the low carbon transition. Assessing and implementing these needs is far from straightforward. Remote rural areas may be better served in the short term by efficient cooking stoves and simple renewable resources than industrial-scale power stations.
The Cancun Agreements aim to support individual developing countries through a new Climate Technology Centre and Network due to come into effect in 2012. It is unclear what funds the Centre might have at its disposal. And there is no response as yet to the pleas of developing countries to hold down costs by relaxing intellectual property rights on low carbon technologies.
The Kyoto Protocol supports technology transfer through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The CDM allows Annex 1 countries to buy carbon credits linked to emissions reduction projects in developing countries.
Efforts to rebalance the CDM will have to be made if the Kyoto Protocol enters a second commitment period. Most projects have been awarded to China; by August 2011, Africa had qualified for only 68 out of 3362 approved projects.
A German project demonstrates the potential of solar energy in a village in southern Senegal, from Deutsche Welle
Climate Finance
To the extent that climate justice is measured by the scale of financial transfers from rich to poor countries, results to date must be regarded as extremely disappointing.
For example, a 2009 evaluation of the UNFCCC Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) revealed that only 22 out of 426 projects identified in National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPAs) had prospects of funding. Established in 2001 to support the NAPA initiative, the LDCF is just one part of the shambolic financial architecture embracing over twenty multilateral and bilateral climate funding initiatives.
The 2009 Copenhagen Accord made a start on scaling up financial support. It promised that Annex 1 countries will provide fast start finance “approaching $30 billion” for the period 2010-2012, rising to $100 billion per annum by 2020.
These promises are embedded in the Cancun Agreements but they still fall short of demands by developing countries that climate finance should fall in the range of 0.5%-1% of GDP, equating to $200-$400 billion per annum.
The Cancun conference also addressed coordination problems by establishing a new Green Climate Fund to channel support for mitigation, adaptation, REDD and technology transfer. The overlap between these activities and conventional development programmes remains a difficulty in monitoring delivery of promised climate finance.
The Fund will be governed by a Board whose membership will be evenly divided between developed and developing countries. Detailed operational guidelines are yet to be agreed and many countries would prefer a more modest role for the World Bank.
There is no indication yet of how the long term finance will be raised. In 2010 a UN High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing presented a range of alternatives to conventional foreign aid.
These options include taxes on aviation and shipping, a global financial transaction levy, and the sale of carbon permits - which can be offset against national emissions reductions targets in richer countries.
Many developing countries and environmental NGOs are uneasy about offsets and the trading of carbon permits as commodities. They question whether these “permits to pollute” defeat the object of emissions reduction.
The alternative pragmatic view considers that recent years of economic crisis have put the price of climate justice beyond the treasuries of the Annex 1 countries. There is no option but to engage with private sector sources of climate finance.
Global Corruption Report: Climate Change. Transparency International warns that unprecedented levels of climate finance will bring risks of mismanagement.
If you like this site, please make a voluntary micropayment to help OneWorld publish its educational Guides (credit/debit card or PayPal).
Climate change impedes the fight against global poverty because poor people tend to live in the most vulnerable locations and lack resources to adapt. For example, the river deltas of Bangladesh and Burma are densely populated by poor households increasingly exposed to cyclones and tidal surges.
|
| Rice crops near Makeni, Sierra Leone © David Hecht / IRIN News |
Strategies to achieve UN targets for global poverty reduction, known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), are therefore being stabbed in the back by climate change. The International Food Policy Research Institute has estimated that, by 2050, the effects of climate change on agriculture will add 25 million children to the total of those suffering from malnutrition.
Nonetheless, global warming is rarely the sole cause of climate-related humanitarian distress in developing countries. Mismanagement of soil and water resources, typical in poor farming environments, invariably plays a role. For example, overgrazing contributes to desertification. Both climate change and local deforestation have been identified as underlying causes of devastating floods in Pakistan in 2010.
Environmental journalist Daniel Grossman talks to PBS NewsHour about Mongolia, where temperature is rising much faster than the global average and where poverty limits the ability to adapt.
Climate Justice
According to the WorldWatch Institute, the world’s richest 500 million people (roughly 7% of the population) are currently responsible for 50% of carbon dioxide emissions, while the poorest 3 billion are responsible for just 6%. In the period 1900-2004, the whole of Africa generated 2.5% of cumulative carbon dioxide emissions whilst the US accounted for 29.5%.
|
| House buried by sand in Mauritania © Phuong Tran / IRIN News |
The concept of climate justice seeks to restore equity in two ways. Firstly, that richer countries should repay their climate debt by undertaking severe cuts in emissions, reserving “atmospheric space” for the growing emissions of poorer countries. Secondly, that they should provide financial support for low carbon transition and adaptation to the damaging effects of climate change.
These principles of climate justice are firmly enshrined in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This treaty was agreed at the Rio de Janeiro "Earth Summit" in 1992 with the ultimate objective of “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.”
The Convention demands application of the precautionary principle and that the scale of emission reductions should be assessed “in the light of the best available scientific information.” And international climate change laws must observe the Convention’s commitment to “common but differentiated responsibilities” between richer and poorer countries.
Developing countries feel that observance of these provisions has been grudging and inadequate. Their sense of grievance has been accentuated by the arbitrary adoption of two degrees as a tolerable temperature rise for the purpose of climate negotiations.
Most climate models predict that richer countries in temperate zones will benefit from higher crop yields within this range. By contrast, crops in tropical regions are already at their limit of temperature sensitivity.
Furthermore, the two degree figure is a global average – most parts of Africa will experience significantly higher increases. On the Tibetan plateau temperatures have been rising at double the global average over the last three decades, setting in motion the retreat of 90% of Himalayan glaciers.
Many small island states are unlikely to survive warming on the two degree scale, due to salinisation of water supplies and ultimate inundation by rising tides.
Desperately slow implementation of the UNFCCC vision has driven climate justice campaigners to refer increasingly to human rights law and to the legal principle of reparations for damages.
A link between climate change and extreme weather? Never. An ironic narrative by Bill McGibben, founder of 350.org, exposes how denial of global warming in the United States is impeding progress towards climate justice; from Plomomedia.
Kyoto Protocol
The Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997 as a supplement to the Framework Convention on Climate Change and eventually ratified in February 2005. Richer countries, known as “Annex 1 countries”, are subject to legally binding targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions. In aggregate, these cuts seek a minimum 5% reduction in the 1990 level of all Annex 1 emissions before the end of a first commitment period in 2012.
|
| Kroo Bay slums, Freetown © Nicholas Reader / IRIN News |
Furthermore, the detailed rules not only exclude emissions from aviation and shipping but also contain various loopholes. The concentration of manufacturing of consumer goods in countries which have no Kyoto Protocol targets is one reason why China has overtaken the US to become the world’s greatest emitter of carbon dioxide.
These shortcomings have allowed global emissions to mushroom. By 2009 they were 40% above the 1990 baseline and the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is now at its highest for at least 800,000 years.
The secretariat of the UNFCCC has been engaged for some years in seeking agreement to renew the Kyoto Protocol. In the 2007 Bali Action Plan, the Annex 1 countries acknowledged their legal obligation to negotiate a second commitment period from 2012, the US agreed to participate in a comparable and parallel negotiating track, and the developing countries agreed to reduce their trajectories of emissions growth, subject to financial and technical support.
The three subsequent UNFCCC annual conferences have witnessed a gradual retreat by the richer countries from the Bali Action Plan. Japan, Canada and Russia now openly oppose renewal of the Kyoto Protocol. And the US offer to reduce its emissions by only 3%-4% from a 1990 baseline by 2020 is not remotely comparable to other Annex 1 countries.
World carbon emissions figures for 2010 illustrate the failure of the Kyoto Protocol to achieve its goals, from Al Jazeera English.
Cancun Agreements
Countries opposed to the Kyoto Protocol want to abandon the UNFCCC principle of a global mitigation target based on science, divided up by agreement between countries, enforced by legal agreement. Instead, they advocate a “pledge and review” system in which countries offer independent targets, according to their circumstances.
|
| Glacial lake outburst site, Bhutan © Piet van der Poel |
The problem with this softer approach is that the pledges add up to barely half of the reductions recommended by scientists. The 2007 4th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) advised that cuts of 25%-40% by 2020 would be necessary to limit average temperature rise to two degrees. Efforts to persuade key countries to improve their pledges in order to fill the "emissions gap" have so far failed.
Developing countries now find themselves in a difficult position. They unanimously favour continuity of the Kyoto Protocol because it binds the big polluting countries to action necessary to fend off the damaging impact of global warming. However, if they refuse to compromise, they may be accused of collapsing the UN process which is the only international forum in which poor countries have an equal voice.
The Cancun Agreements, settled at the 2010 conference, cover a wide range of valuable subsidiary matters but the most important issues were deferred. There was no agreement on the scale of emissions reductions, the inclusion of aviation and shipping, the appropriate legal framework, or how to raise the finance promised to assist developing countries.
It seems probable that the UN climate conference in Durban in December 2011 may be forced to construct a stalling mechanism to sustain the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012.
Global warming shows no inclination to synchronize its progress with prevaricating politicians. At the Cancun conference, the World Meteorological Organization announced that the decade ending in 2010 has been the hottest on record.
Right to Develop
A fundamental dilemma is how to cut global greenhouse gas emissions without denying the right of developing countries to industrialize their economies. Carbon dioxide emissions in Africa in 2009 were just 1.1 tonnes per capita compared with 17.7 tonnes in the US.
|
| Photo-voltaic panels, India © Peter Armstrong |
The majority of these households currently meet their energy needs through the use of wood for fuel and charcoal, a major cause of deforestation and carbon dioxide emissions. The transition to more efficient energy use will therefore play a valuable dual role of poverty reduction and emissions mitigation.
Population growth - an obvious source of rising emissions - offers a similar example. Almost all projected growth in population will occur in developing countries. National population strategies which recognise the importance of women’s education and access to family planning will contribute not only to women’s rights but also to lower consumption of resources that contribute to climate change.
Environmentalists and poverty reduction campaigners have been slow to grasp this interdependence of their interests. The Cancun Agreements include acceptance by the poorer countries to develop their economies on a more efficient basis than “business as usual.” They have agreed to prepare “nationally appropriate mitigation actions” setting out their plans for low carbon development.
Adaptation
Practical measures which reduce vulnerability to the impact of climate change are described as "adaptation”. The concept betrays our failure to prevent global warming and that its consequences are unavoidable and imminent.
Scope for effective adaptation is determined by local adaptive capacity, a measure which exposes global inequality at its most extreme. Armed with their highly educated, healthy and skilled workforces, industrialised countries are already committing to defensive projects in anticipation of floods, coastal erosion and new patterns of agriculture. Price tags of hundreds of millions of dollars are no disincentive.
|
| Selling potatoes in Nairobi © Julius Mwelu / IRIN News |
In light of these difficult circumstances, consensus is building that the most effective approach to adaptation is to promote climate-resilient and faster development. If communities are less poor and their livelihoods less vulnerable to unpredictable weather, their prospects for coping with change will be enhanced. As with emissions reduction, adaptation and development are two sides of the same coin.
For example, plans for diversifying agriculture or improving soil and water conservation already feature in food security programmes in poor countries. Provided the risk of climate variability is recognised in their design, then such programmes will fulfil agendas for both poverty reduction and adaptation to climate change.
An inevitable consequence of this approach is the considerable difficulty in separating out costs of climate adaptation from the costs of existing development goals. This partly accounts for the poor allocation of climate finance to adaptation projects.
The Cancun agreements seek to redress the balance in stating that “adaptation must be addressed with the same priority as mitigation.” The UN Human Development Report for 2007 priced adaptation in developing countries at $86 billion per annum, not far short of the current total of foreign aid.
Heather McGray, Senior Associate at the World Resources Institute, explains how to enable the rural poor to adapt to a changing climate.
Disaster Risk and Migration
It is important to recognise that adaptation to climate change has limits, beyond which disaster risk reduction becomes the appropriate proactive response. This is an increasingly prominent feature of development plans in poor countries.
Examples of risk reduction include the community shelters, public awareness programmes, raised roads and buildings, and early warning systems now familiar in the deltas of Bangladesh. These measures have already proved their worth in saving lives.
|
| Tornado forming over Irrawaddy Delta © Julien Cadu / IRIN News |
Cost estimates of $15 billion for the destruction caused by the 2010 Pakistan floods have drawn attention to the rising cost of global warming. Although such events can only partly be attributed to climate change, the Cancun Agreements took the unprecedented step of establishing a work programme “to address loss and damage associated with climate change impacts in developing countries.”
The offer of climate risk insurance cover in regions where it might not be available on normal commercial terms, or in farming communities able to afford only very small premiums, is likely to be one strand of investigation.
The “slow onset” category of climate disaster, such as desertification or salinisation of soil and water resources, may ultimately render land unfit for human habitation, forcing migration in the last resort. The head of Indonesia’s delegation to UN climate change negotiations has said that 20 million people living in low-lying coastal regions might have to move within 15-20 years.
The extent to which climate change may lead to cross-border migration, as opposed to internal displacement, is speculative but rough estimates suggest a total of 200-250 million by 2050.
The UN Refugee Agency acknowledges that some degree of new international humanitarian protection should be provided but rejects the terminology of “climate refugees” out of concern for destabilising the long-established rights of political refugees.
Aid projects in Mozambique help farmers to cope with extreme weather, from UK Department of International Development
Deforestation and Climate Change
The IPCC 2007 Assessment estimated that deforestation contributes 17.4% of all greenhouse gas emissions, a higher figure than expected for a category omitted from the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol. The Bali conference of 2007 therefore encouraged research on how developing countries might be compensated financially for protecting their forests through a scheme now known as “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation” (REDD).
|
| Primary forest, Brazil, CFU000553 © Roberto Faidutti / FAO |
REDD must find ways of replacing the value of these activities to poor rural communities and to safeguard the rights of indigenous groups whose livelihoods depend on the forest.
REDD pilot projects are under way in key forest countries to test whether safeguards can be effective and to explore logistical difficulties. These include the measurement of forest assets, the leakage risk that protection of one region will condemn the neighbouring forest to the loggers, and verification that deforestation has been reduced or stopped.
The Cancun Agreements endorse the REDD approach but defer difficult questions over a suitable mechanism for generating the necessary long term finance. Estimates suggest that costs of a complete end to deforestation by 2030 might approach $20 billion per annum.
It is broadly accepted that REDD could be one of the most efficient and cost effective ways of tackling climate change. However, the protracted nature of international climate negotiations has slowed momentum, allowing reservations to gain some traction.
Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries from TVE Inspiring Change
Technology Transfer
The transfer of energy efficient technologies from rich to poor countries has an important role to play in the low carbon transition. Assessing and implementing these needs is far from straightforward. Remote rural areas may be better served in the short term by efficient cooking stoves and simple renewable resources than industrial-scale power stations.
|
| Solar lantern © Practical Action |
The Kyoto Protocol supports technology transfer through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). The CDM allows Annex 1 countries to buy carbon credits linked to emissions reduction projects in developing countries.
Efforts to rebalance the CDM will have to be made if the Kyoto Protocol enters a second commitment period. Most projects have been awarded to China; by August 2011, Africa had qualified for only 68 out of 3362 approved projects.
A German project demonstrates the potential of solar energy in a village in southern Senegal, from Deutsche Welle
Climate Finance
To the extent that climate justice is measured by the scale of financial transfers from rich to poor countries, results to date must be regarded as extremely disappointing.
|
| Flooding near Monrovia © Marcus Wleh / IRIN News |
The 2009 Copenhagen Accord made a start on scaling up financial support. It promised that Annex 1 countries will provide fast start finance “approaching $30 billion” for the period 2010-2012, rising to $100 billion per annum by 2020.
These promises are embedded in the Cancun Agreements but they still fall short of demands by developing countries that climate finance should fall in the range of 0.5%-1% of GDP, equating to $200-$400 billion per annum.
The Cancun conference also addressed coordination problems by establishing a new Green Climate Fund to channel support for mitigation, adaptation, REDD and technology transfer. The overlap between these activities and conventional development programmes remains a difficulty in monitoring delivery of promised climate finance.
The Fund will be governed by a Board whose membership will be evenly divided between developed and developing countries. Detailed operational guidelines are yet to be agreed and many countries would prefer a more modest role for the World Bank.
There is no indication yet of how the long term finance will be raised. In 2010 a UN High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing presented a range of alternatives to conventional foreign aid.
These options include taxes on aviation and shipping, a global financial transaction levy, and the sale of carbon permits - which can be offset against national emissions reductions targets in richer countries.
Many developing countries and environmental NGOs are uneasy about offsets and the trading of carbon permits as commodities. They question whether these “permits to pollute” defeat the object of emissions reduction.
The alternative pragmatic view considers that recent years of economic crisis have put the price of climate justice beyond the treasuries of the Annex 1 countries. There is no option but to engage with private sector sources of climate finance.
Global Corruption Report: Climate Change. Transparency International warns that unprecedented levels of climate finance will bring risks of mismanagement.
If you like this site, please make a voluntary micropayment to help OneWorld publish its educational Guides (credit/debit card or PayPal).
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