ActionAid Makes Recommendations to UN Climate Adaptation Fund
While the world’s poor have had almost nothing to do with creating the problem change, they are facing the greatest challenges in coping with its impacts. For approximately one billion of the poorest people in the world, climate change is seen not an issue of mitigation (or the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions), but as an issue of adaptation.
The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change estimates that approximately US$67 billion a year is needed for developing countries to adapt to climate change. Only a small fraction of those funds have been raised. Moreover, the existing mechanisms for adaptation funding do not meet ActionAid’s criteria of democratic governance, sustainable and compensatory funding, and access to the most vulnerable communities. (For more information on these criteria, please see ActionAid’s “Compensating for Climate Change: Principles and Lessons for Equitable Adaptation Funding.”)
However, there is still hope. One of the key agreements reached at the thirteenth Conference of the Parties (COP 13) in Bali, December 2007, was the decision to create a new fund for adaptation. The process of making the fund operational creates new opportunities to construct an effective and equitable adaptation fund that will truly benefit the most vulnerable communities.
The Adaptation Fund (AF) is fundamentally different from the other existing funds for adaptation. It relies primarily on a two percent levy on Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) projects. Negotiated as part of the Kyoto Protocol, these projects are intended to channel carbon-cutting energy investments financed by rich-country companies to developing countries, in exchange for carbon credits. Additional funds will come from other unspecified sources.
The AF is expected to become the largest and most reliably financed of the existing funds. The World Bank estimates that the amount of money available could reach as much as $500 million by 2012. It is important to note that if the two percent levy on CDM projects were expanded to other flexible mechanisms the amount of money available under the Adaptation Fund could amount to tens of billions of dollars a year. Such mechanisms could include new levies on air and maritime travel, voluntary contributions and revenues generated by national cap-and-trade sytems. ActionAid is working with civil society organizations from all over the world to push for the expansion of these and other mechanisms to ensure that the Adaptation Fund has the resources it needs to function effectively.
The Adaptation Fund Board is meeting from June 16-19 to set Fund’s rules, procedures, guidelines, and priorities. ActionAid has observer status to the Adaptation Fund Board meetings and is actively engaging with board members to insist that they adopt the rules and create the structures necessary for it to become a truly equitable and effective fund.
