Climate adaptation: saviour or false hope?

Ben Castle in the New Internationalist blog: ...In recent years, adaptation has become a key focus of international climate change negotiations. Once a fringe issue, it is now at the centre of the climate debate. The pledge by developed countries to raise $100 billion in climate finance per year by 2020 (with much of this for adaptation in developing countries) was one of the few positives to come out of the much derided Copenhagen COP meeting in 2009. Much of this year’s negotiations in Doha have also been focused on the question of funding.

On the one hand this could be seen as an encouraging sign that the COP process may yet deliver some tangible results for those most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. A couple of weeks ago I reported from farming communities in the mountains of Bolivia, where climate change is already a reality. Such communities urgently need support to help them adapt to the changes that are underway. Yet many Bolivian civil society groups remain unconvinced that a growing focus on adaptation within international negotiations offers much reason for optimism.

For activists such as Martin Vilela from the Bolivian Climate Change Platform the pledges of adaptation support are all too often ‘empty promises’. He doubts that significant resources will ever arrive and says that the ambiguity of the $100 billion figure ‘does not offer any kind of clear commitment (on adaptation financing)’. Martin points to the way developed countries are already trying to ‘reduce expectations’ and are blaming the economic crisis for not being able to provide more funds. Recent research by IIED seems to support Martin’s reservations, showing that adaptation finance has been inadequate to date, with many donors simply relabelling pre-existing aid as climate finance – so it is not in fact ‘new and additional’, as was promised at Copenhagen....

A rainbow in the Faroe Islands, shot by Erik Christensen, Porkeri, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Rich nations alone can't halt global warming

Space Daily via AFP: Poor nations must make haste to curb greenhouse gas emissions as even an impossible zero-percent pollution target for the developed world by 2030 won't stop calamitous climate change, a report warned Tuesday.

Co-authored by former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern, the document said that while rich countries are responsible for the bulk of Earth-warming gas emissions since the industrial age, the world could not afford to play the blame-game.

All countries, rich and poor, were moving "recklessly slow" on reducing emissions, said the report issued on the sidelines of UN climate talks in Doha, Qatar.

"There is a deep inequity in that rich countries grew wealthy on high-carbon growth, and poor countries will be hit particularly hard by climate change," it said.

"Recognition of that inequity must play a strong part in building international collaboration, but must not be allowed to block progress: that would be the most inequitable of all outcomes"....

Nicholas Stern in 2000

Namibia: Poor countries want fund for loss and damage

Irene Ihoaes in AllAfrica.com via New Era (Namibia): east Developed Countries (LDCs) are calling for the establishment of a fund to deal with the problem of loss and damage, as a result of climate change and global warming.

"We are looking for an international mechanism on loss and damage, although it is seen as part of the Cancun Adaptation Framework. It should be a form of compensation, there is no way you can run away from this," Pa Ousman Jarful, chairman of the LDC Group at the climate change negotiations told reporters on the sideline of the 18th session of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Doha, Qatar.

The 18th Session of the UNFCCC and the 8th session of the Conference of Parties (COP) serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol started on Monday November 26 and will run until December 07. Loss and damage, a new concept in climate change discourse refers to the negative effects of climate variability and climate change that people are not able to cope with or adapt to.

According to Jarful, loss and damage is a reality for many vulnerable communities, adding that failure to address that will compromise sustainable development and ensure affected countries that have contributed least to global greenhouse emissions will continue to suffer disproportionately. Each LDC at least needs US$3 billion to build resilience, while each of the countries had allocated funds themselves to deal with the problem.

Jarful is against loans for adaptation, stating that LDCs are not responsible for the loss and damage caused by climate change and need to be compensated and not just given loans. "Every country has to put institutional mechanisms in place to monitor funds that are coming in for adaptation. We have learnt from our mistakes, we have mainstream adaptation and climate change in our developmental plans," he added....

The Doha skyline, shot by Amjra, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Blog Post on Conservation and Human Rights

From its origins in seeking to protect disappearing wildlife at the behest of big-game hunters, conservation has evolved unpredictably and substantively over the past century. With a firm conviction that the practice of conservation, to paraphrase Dr Martin Luther King Jr, is long but ‘bending toward justice’, Dr Kent Redford recently traced the developments in conservation practices and the increasing emphasis on the need to incorporate human rights discourses and practices into conservation in a blog post for Just Conservation.

According to Dr Redford, “change also came about at the turn of the last century because of the issue of justice. The arc of conservation was bending with the realization that our moral argument for the value of conserving biodiversity was seriously flawed if we ourselves were acting immorally towards people. Seeking one justice did not justify abrogating another. So conservation entered the period of accommodation, of self-examination, and of change. It was clear that we needed to seriously consider how our actions, taken in pursuit of conservation goals, affected the rights of the people impacted by those actions.” 

Find the full blog post here.

Step up climate action to reduce poverty

Helen Clark in AlertNet: The devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy reminds us once again of the destructive potential of extreme weather - even in a developed country such as the United States, and even with ample warning and swift emergency response. From Kingston, Jamaica to Jamaica, Queens, this “perfect storm” exacted a deadly toll that New York’s mayor reckoned was even higher as a result of climate change.

But while developed countries dig ever deeper to fund elaborate flood defense systems, compensate farmers, and adjust thermostats to accommodate hotter summers, the consequences of climate change in Africa can be catastrophic: Crops fail. People go hungry. Girls spend less time in school and more time collecting increasingly scarce water for their families.

With little ability to plan for disasters or adjust to shifting weather patterns, poor people and poor countries bear the brunt of more frequent droughts, intense storms, and floods - dramatically undercutting hard-won gains in human development and productivity.

Without more coordinated global action to tackle climate change, now, addressing global poverty - and all its associated risks - will become exponentially more difficult, and costs associated with adapting to and mitigating climate change will rise sharply.

Significant finance already exists for climate change adaptation and mitigation. Applied to smart strategies, we could, as a global community, make the transition to green and inclusive economies that tackle inequality, advance development, and stop the ongoing assault on our ecosystem...

Women carrying water in Afghanistan in 1976, shot by Ian Alexander, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license