FINANCING CLIMATE CHANGE ADAPTATION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES (original) (raw)
Related papers
Beyond Aid: Ensuring adaptation to climate change works for the poor
2009
Climate-related shocks are affecting the lives of millions of poor people with increasing frequency and severity. Without urgent action, recent development progress will stall – then go into reverse. The international community must make a new commitment to fund adaptation to climate change. Funds must be additional to the promise to deliver 0.7 per cent of rich country income as aid and raised and managed in new ways. A global adaptation finance mechanism is needed, able to deliver the scale of funding required and governed according to the principles of equity, subsidiarity, transparency, and accountability. This will insure against future development losses and help to resuscitate the international climate negotiations, laying the foundations for a fair and safe deal at Copenhagen at the end of this year.
Sustainability
Worldwide only about four percent of the estimated $500 billion-plus in public and private climate finance in 2017 was destined for adaptation. However, institutions like the World Bank are positioning themselves for a transformation in adaptation finance, seeking to provide substantially more adaptation finance as distinct from financial support for greenhouse gas mitigation. This article explores the recent emergence of adaptation as a higher priority and how a longer-term time horizon is necessary if a transformation in climate change governance is to occur which places greater emphasis on sustainable development goals relating to improvement of circumstances of citizens in the most climate-vulnerable nations, mostly in the Global South. The article also considers the important debate in the climate change policy literature over the extent to which funds supporting adaptation are going to lower-income nations or people, as might be anticipated given the view that the poor are mor...
2016
Climate change might be seen as a remote issue compared with more urgent problems, as poverty, disease and economic stagnation. However, it can directly affect the efficiency of resource investments and eventually hinder the achievement of many development objectives. There is therefore a need to link climate change considerations with development priorities. Considerable research has already been done on climate change mitigation but much less attention has been paid to make development strategies more resilient to climate change impacts. Lack of awareness of climate change within the development community and limitations on resources to implement response measures are the most frequently cited explanations. Mainstreaming climate policies could also prove difficult to carry out because of direct trade-offs between development priorities and the actions required to deal with climate change. Governments and donors confronting pressing challenges, such as poverty and inadequate infras...
Responding to a Changing Climate : Challenges in Financing Climate-Resilient Development Assistance
2010
The inherent link between poverty alleviation, sustainable development and climate change has changed the concept of offi cial development assistance, expanding its traditional focus from economic development and welfare to include environmental sustainability and protection from catastrophic climate change threats. Refl ecting this change is the recent proliferation of climate change fi nancing instruments to address these new and rising challenges. Accompanying this rapid expansion are complexities that must be carefully considered as development assistance reform evolves to account for changes in the world’s climate and to ensure low-carbon sustainable growth. This policy brief underlines four key challenges in achieving climate-resilient growth in developing countries:
Financing Climate Change Adaptation: International Initiatives
Sustainability, 2021
Climate change adaptation is one of the main strategies to address global climate change. The least developed countries and the small island states that lack financial resources to adapt to climate change are the most vulnerable nations to climate change. Although it would be more economical to adapt to climate change compared to the anticipated damage of not doing so, the demand for capital is estimated to range to hundreds of billions. The crucial question is how to manage investments to adapt to climate change globally. This study provides an overview of existing international provisions on climate finance for adaptation. It includes provisions through international financial institutions, United Nations agencies, bilateral and multilateral channels, and the private sector. It also explores how private sector finance can be further attracted to invest in climate change adaptation.
Climate change financing: Developing countries’ options and challenges for mitigation and adaptation
The objective of this paper is to present an assessment of existing and proposed mechanisms to financing climate change interventions in developing countries, and to provide guidance on the best ways to make progress in raising and utilizing such financing. Recent events pose major challenges to the availability and sustainability of public (official and developing countries’ domestic resources) and private financial flows to developing countries. Yet, they also provide an opportunity to implement mechanisms for collective action at a global scale, particularly on issues such as climate change that affect both developed and developing countries.
Historically, many decision makers in developing countries and rapidly emerging economies have believed that they should focus on “growing the economy” first before then focusing on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and adapting to climate change. This belief rests on a series of assumptions that this thesis refutes. For instance, - Incorrect Assumption #1 - That the costs of inaction from unmitigated climate change will be small for developing nations. As this thesis shows, recent economic studies show that 70-80% of the costs of inaction of unmitigated climate change will impact developing countries. (World Bank, 20091) And that long term unmitigated climate change threatens much of the economy of many developing national economies and their peoples which are often dependent on rain-fed agriculture, hydroelectric power and coral based coastal fisheries for their well-being. (See Chapter 1 for more details) - Incorrect Assumption #2 – That climate change mitigation and adaptation will cost too much and can only be afforded once developing countries have reached a certain level of per capita GDP. That there are few profitable opportunities to clean up now and mitigate climate change, because, in a free market, private actors have supposedly already invested in options that provide financial savings and profits. As this thesis shows in Chapter 2, 3 and 4, due to market, informational and institutional failures there are many opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions with both good returns on investment and developmental co-benefits. Specifically, Chapter 2 shows that action on climate change is a very effective way to achieve, at lowest cost, many aspects of the 17 goals of the current UN Sustainable Development Goals draft. Chapter 2 also shows that there are many aspects of climate change mitigation can significantly help to boost developing country economic growth once co-benefits are taken into account. This thesis investigates where climate change adaptation strategies have climate change mitigation and development co-benefits and vice versa. (See Chapters 2-4)This thesis shows that this has been recognised recently by a few developing countries like Ethiopia and Kenya who have formally recognised the value of identifying and focusing on integrated development/mitigation/adaptation strategies – known as climate resilient pathways. (Chapter 3). Chapter 3 shows that the recent work of these countries is evidencing the economic, social and environmental value of such an integrated approach to development and climate change mitigation and adaptation. (Chapter 3) This thesis focuses on mapping these synergies between development and climate change mitigation and adaptation in Chapter 2 and 3 because to date, most developing countries (and some OECD countries) have developed their development, climate change adaptation and mitigation plans separate from each other without appreciating the potential synergies between them. As this thesis shows, this has been partly due to the fact that countries have been required to research and develop national climate change adaptation plans by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) separate from their climate change mitigation plans. The UNFCCC guideline documents for developing national adaptation plans do not mention once either the words mitigation or climate change mitigation/adaptation nexus or the climate/energy/water nexus or energy/water nexus. These individual climate change mitigation and adaptation reports developed by developing countries tend to consist of very long lists of separate items to do, which are never able to be fully and immediately funded. The very task of doing separate national climate change mitigation and adaptation reports results in both reports together, with their extremely long lists of things to do, resulting in decision makers concluding that developing countries will never have the resources to implement them. These can reinforce a sense of hopelessness and despair. Development is challenging. There are many calls on scarce developmental resources. If national climate change mitigation or adaptation plans don’t clearly show how they can help achieve core developmental goals and pressing issues, then there is a risk that climate change mitigation and adaptation ends up being seen as another “nice thing to do”, if and when developing countries can afford it. This thesis shows that, conversely, it is possible to identify many climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies that have in the past helped actual developmental goals in different developing countries. This thesis shows that identifying these development/mitigation and adaptation synergies has helped countries like Ethiopia and Kenya to prioritise climate change action and build political and community will to make progress6. This thesis also contends that another value of this climate resilient pathway approach is that it could even help to change the discourse around the costs of climate change action for developing countries. Chapter’s 2-4 evidence that smart action on climate change is not a cost or a burden, but rather contributes to achieving development goals with good returns on investment, so enhancing economic growth rather than harming it. Finally, some argue that developing countries rich in fossil fuels will be overall losers if the world adopts a global climate change agreement. This belief underpins lack of support from certain fossil fuel rich developing countries, like Saudi Arabia, to a global agreement on climate change. However, as this thesis suggests, this assumption needs to be questioned as - fossil fuel rich developing countries are currently highly vulnerable to many risks of climate change such as more extreme heat waves, prolonged drought, the spread of desertification, more intense rainfall and flooding and the spread of vector borne disease, and . - , until recently, little detailed work has been done to assess the actual costs of mitigation and adaptation for these fossil fuel rich developing countries. Clearly it is beyond the scope of this one Master’s thesis to examine the costs of inaction versus action on climate change for all fossil fuel rich developing countries, so this thesis considers one of these nations - Nigeria. In Chapter 4, the costs of inaction versus action on climate change are considered for Nigeria through an integration of the latest literature examining aspects of this for Nigeria. Chapter 4 shows that the costs of inaction on climate change have been formally recognised to be as high as 30% of national GDP by 2050 in official Nigerian government documents. This is because the Nigerian agricultural regions, oil and gas sectors as well as most of the developed regions along the Nigerian coast are highly vulnerable to changes to rainfall or storm surges and sea level rises respectively. The risks from unmitigated climate change beyond 2050 are even higher because the risks of negative impacts from prolonged drought and sea level rises become even greater. Conversely this chapter shows that, for Nigeria, the economic benefits of pursuing a low carbon climate resilient development pathway are higher than business as usual even in the short term from 2015 to 2035. Chapter 4 shows that climate resilient pathway development approaches are essential to ensuring climate change does not undermine the achievement of Nigeria’s development goals. The literature integrated in Chapter 4 also suggests that action on climate change in Nigeria will result in higher economic growth than business as usual even in the short term between 2015 and 2035. This is a significant result. It suggests that similar studies should be applied to other fossil fuel rich developing nations to help better inform their decision makers by showing them the potential significant benefit of a well-designed global agreement on climate change for their nations too.