International Adaptation Assistance - the Dark Side of the Climate Debate
We have shared views in an earlier blog on climate adaptation, but recent discussion of responsibility for the overall global impacts of climate change leads us to return to the subject. For some time it has been clear that great care needs to be taken in how greenhouse gas reduction responsibilities are assigned to developing nations. They do not want to be denied the blessings of development in order to counter global warming created by the economies of the developed world over the past decades.
Now, a second major issue has surfaced. The developing world is going to need adaptation assistance – upwards of an initial $100 billion – as it experiences actual injuries from the changing climate. The issue is kicking up a lot of sand recently.
The impacts of an altered climate – coastal erosion and inundation, health effects, drought, and extreme weather events – are expected to be more severe in developing countries. The choice of means to provide climate adaptation assistance to developing countries is fraught with the greatest policy ramifications. Should aid be provided through technical expertise, direct grants, loans, or combinations of these?
As members of the community of nations, wealthier countries historically have had no problem stepping forward to help correct global disparities in economic development, public health, and human rights protection. But to be told that their greenhouse emissions have caused massive harms for which billions in reparations are now due causes many developed nations to question how to proceed. Yet, the debate over direct aid grants vs. adaptation loans has now taken on precisely this dimension. International reparations payments for aggression and injustice have a long and tangled history.
If adaptation assistance is provided to right past wrongs, then some may argue that a developed nation's generous adaptation assistance can be taken as an admission of wrongdoing, a basis for civil liability. The same facts, the same analyses, stand behind both the climate-justice rationale for legislative aid to counter climate impacts (S. 3036 SEC. 4801-4804) as underpin the several suits now making their way through the courts seeking damages for “climate torts.”
If loans are provided instead of direct grants, does this evade the difficulty? Perhaps, but the concept of loans to be paid off with interest does not sit well with advocates for adaptation and “climate resiliency” aid to the developing world. The UK has offered $1.56 billion to be incorporated in a World Bank adaptation fund, but the UK has indicated that the fund is for loans, not grants. Advocates say debt-stressed developing nations should not be loaned, but given, the aid that is owed for the damage greenhouse emissions have caused over time.
Also, advocates are questioning the pivotal role the World Bank group is angling to play in deciding where and how any funds are to be invested. They want a role in deciding how the pie will be sliced, not unlike stakeholders in the US debate over the revenues from cap-and-trade want a say in any federal revenues will be distributed.
Where does this issue stand in the US today? Because the US is not a Kyoto signatory and has not offered funds, the adaptation debate in the US is just beginning. Each of the concerns addressed above will figure into the US's legislative debate in the coming months. What is almost certain is that some of the huge revenues of the Lieberman-Warner bill's cap-and-trade provisions will be earmarked for adaptation assistance. Other legislative proposals are also in the wings. Watch this space.
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