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.
Climate Adaptation
As we consider climate legislation, we do not like to be reminded that despite our best efforts, the likelihood is that national and global GHG reductions will not be enough in time to keep regional climate from changing significantly. A new two-year Resources for the Future project, “Adapting to Climate Change,” has as its purpose developing an array of on-the-ground measures to allow our institutions to mitigate the effects of climate change, when and if it occurs. [summary]
Economists sometimes bear the brunt of criticism for pointing out what the rest of us don't like to hear. They seem determined to ruin the party, by pointing out that costs accompany benefits and that there is no free ride in the economy. Theirs, it has been said, is the dismal science, and it was for good reason that Malthus said of his own work that it had a “melancholy hue.”
For over a half-century, the Washington-based economics think tank Resources for the Future has tried to overcome some of the melancholy aspects of federal policy-making by proposing realistic, more efficient solutions to the economic burdens that environmental regulation imposes. Economists at RfF helped pioneer the emissions trading schemes that are now enshrined in the Clean Air Act's sulfur and nitrogen oxide schemes that are the models for the cap-and-trade provisions included in current climate bills. Now, RfF's realistic economists are turning to another aspect of the changing climate – the likelihood that national and global greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) reductions will not be enough in time to keep regional climate from changing significantly.
A new two-year RfF project, “Adapting to Climate Change,” has as its purpose developing an array of on-the-ground measures to allow our institutions to mitigate the effects of climate change, when and if it occurs. True to the tradition of RfF to seek effective and efficient solutions, the project looks to draw upon the natural sciences and engineering communities to identify climate impacts and the strategies we can employ to mitigate the severity of those impacts.
The effort will look systematically at freshwater resources, coastal and marine ecosystems, public health, agriculture, public infrastructure and land use, and terrestrial ecosystems and biodiversity. The World Health Organization, for example, drew attention to the severe potential health impacts of climate change on the occasion of World Health Day, April 7th. With limited resources to meet the challenge, the project will try to establish principles to inform the choice among options, a means of ranking the threats and solutions, selection of the appropriate levels of governmental response, and means of financing adaptation measures that are sure to be quite expensive. The final product of the project may be a “Climate Adaptation Response Policy” that can help guide the nation's efforts when and if climate adaptation becomes a necessary part of the national response.
The project is guided by a broadly-selected interdisciplinary Steering Committee. Its members include McKenna's Fred Anderson, who has a long relationship with RfF in a number of areas.
Malthus’ view had a melancholy hue, but fortunately his speculations about human birth rates and population outrunning available resources and causing a dire overload of the earth's ability to cope were, to put it in the most generous light, premature. Perhaps predications of catastrophic climate change will also prove unfounded, either because nations manage to control GHG releases in time, or the science of climate change proves to be more forgiving than currently anticipated. But RfF deserves to be commended for taking one of the few meaningful steps to address the likelihood of significant impacts from global warming trend and to encourage clear-headed thinking about what can be done to adjust to the changes in weather pattern and severity, freshwater availability, irrigated agriculture, and the many other sectors likely to experience major change if the climate threat materializes.
