(The Conversation) Wealthy Countries Still Haven’t Met Their $100 Billion Pledge To Help Poor Countries Face Climate Change, And The Risks Are Rising

The Conversation - Rishikesh Ram Bhandary

Several countries, including Bangladesh, are facing increasing flooding as sea levels rise. AP Photo/Mahmud Hossain Opu

Author Rishikesh Ram Bhandary is Assistant Director, Global Economic Governance Initiative, Global Development Policy Center, Boston University

After another year of record-breaking temperatures and extreme weather disasters, wealthy countries are under pressure to make good on their commitment to mobilize US$100 billion a year to help poorer countries deal with climate change.

Developed countries now project that they won’t meet that pledge until 2023 – three years late and still woefully short of the real need.

A report due Feb. 28 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is expected to provide more evidence of what billions of people are facing: Developing countries that have contributed the least to climate change are suffering the most from it, and the damage is escalating.

Small island states and low-lying coastal areas are losing land to rising seas. Flooding from extreme storms is wiping out people’s livelihoods in Africa and Asia. Heat waves are harming people who have no access to cooling, killing crops and affecting marine life communities rely on.

Documents from the United Nations suggest that the cost for low-income countries to adapt to these and other climate impacts far exceeds the promised $100 billion a year.

What’s less clear is how much impact the climate finance already flowing to these countries, estimated at $79.6 billion in 2019, is having.

There is an overwhelming lack of data, as well as evidence that countries have been supporting projects that could harm the climate with money they count as “climate finance.”

Part of the problem is how that money gets from donors to projects in countries in need. I have worked closely with developing countries seeking help to deal with climate change.

I believe that by paying closer attention to the strengths and weaknesses of climate finance delivery channels and matching them to countries’ needs, the international community can make a real difference in the fight against climate change.



How does climate finance flow?

Donor countries have three major channels through which they can route climate finance: bilateral agreements between small groups of countries, international funds like the Green Climate Fund and development banks like the World Bank. Each has benefits and drawbacks.

Bilateral agreements: First, countries can directly negotiate financing commitments, also known as bilateral agreements.

These arrangements allow donors to target specific areas of need and are often more efficient than multilateral agreements, since they involve fewer entities.

For example, at the Glasgow climate conference in November 2021, South Africa and a group of donor countries announced an $8.5 billion effort to help South Africa transition away from coal while increasing renewable energy generation. This deal allowed four national governments and the European Union to come together and craft a package around what South Africa wanted.

Groups of donors have also come together to support national-level financing, though new research suggests these arrangements are underused.

A major drawback of bilateral arrangements is that they can be sensitive to the ebbs and flows of political attention. While issues in the news can attract funding, some countries struggle to get help.

Climate funds: It is precisely to ensure that countries have regular and consistent access to climate finance that a second option exists: international climate funds.

For example, the U.N.-backed Green Climate Fund is one of the largest and offers universal eligibility. The GCF’s scope is also deliberately broad to allow room for programming based on what countries actually need, rather than what is politically attractive at any given moment.

However, the GCF has received pledges totaling only about $18 billion. Developed countries are more likely to route contributions through their own bilateral channels or major development banks than through climate-focused funds.

Farmers sort through fast-maturing beans harvested in Uganda. Agriculture projects receive a large share of finance for adapting to climate change and increasing sustainability. AP Photo/Rodney Muhumuza

Development banks: Finally, major development banks manage significant amounts of climate financing, though there are two key barriers to fully using them.

First, many of these banks have not ambitiously incorporated climate change into their programming. In fact, some came under scrutiny when their joint statement at the Glasgow climate conference did not include specific targets and timetables for ending financing for fossil fuel projects.

Second, most development banks have not been able to effectively mobilize finance from the private sector, in part because of their business models.

Development banks tend to prefer projects with lower risk and like to operate in settings where the cost of doing business is not very high.

Private-sector funding is crucial to filling the climate finance gap, which means that development banks also need to use instruments that are better able to mobilize private capital such as equity instead of relying too heavily on lending.

Ultimately, splitting climate finance across these different channels is helping to render financing largely ineffective, with developing countries receiving a fraction of the resources necessary to make an impact.

Spreading finance thinly across delivery channels means the international community is neither learning from experimentation nor betting on bold ideas.

Getting serious about impact

Currently, the efforts to track the $100 billion are focused on counting how much money has actually flowed and where, not what impact has been achieved. Two key issues are complicating efforts to measure the impact.

First, there is no agreed-upon definition of what climate finance is, and countries use their own definitions. For example, in the past Japan counted money for new coal plants that are more efficient than old ones, but still highly polluting, as “climate finance.”

Second, some projects focus on helping countries put in place plans and policies. For example, countries have been receiving support to create national adaptation plans. The impact of these planning efforts really relies on how well the plans are implemented.

If the global community is serious about rising to the climate challenge, I believe the conversation needs to move forward in three ways:

1. The scale of financing should far surpass $100 billion.
2. The international community should be more targeted about which sources and channels best meet specific needs.
3. More research is needed to assess the impact of international climate finance so far and establish a sound understanding of which delivery channels work best for which purposes.

The $100 billion in promised funding is much-needed glue that helps hold the U.N. climate process together – it reflects the responsibility borne by countries that have been emitting greenhouse gases for years for driving climate change and the harm to countries that emit little.

Links - The Conversation Climate Change Articles

• Mitigation
• Climate change
• Adaptation
• international development
• United Nations
• Natural disasters
• climate risk
• Climate finance
• International aid

(AU The Guardian) Greens Unveil $19bn Plan To Subsidise Coal Workers To Transition Away From Fossil Fuel Jobs

The Guardian - Josh Butler

Adam Bandt says Australia must quit coal and take advantage of ‘enormous opportunities’ in critical minerals and green metals

Adam Bandt says the Greens’ plan to transition from fossil fuels to clean energy aims to give local communities control over their future. Photograph: Mick Tsikas/AAP

The Greens have proposed a $19bn plan to diversify fossil fuel-reliant towns and subsidise the wages of coal workers who transition into new jobs, saying employees can stay in mining but should seek employment in critical minerals or green metals.

Workers would get a decade or more support under the plan, with the Greens’ idea seeing the government pay half the wage of their new job in “non-polluting industries” outside the coal, oil and gas sectors.

The focus on transitioning mining towns into new industries comes as the Greens stress their belief that “coal workers haven’t caused the climate crisis”, three years after former party leader Bob Brown’s anti-Adani convoy through Queensland was partly blamed by some for a cratering of the progressive vote in that state.

“Australia is sleepwalking into the closure of the coal industry, but every single worker is being told by the Liberal and Labor parties that they have nothing to worry about,” the Greens leader, Adam Bandt, said.

“We owe coal workers a debt of thanks for powering our country. We don’t need to choose between taking urgent climate action and supporting coal communities. We can do both.”

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Bandt will travel to the Hunter coal region to announce the ‘looking after coal workers’ policy.

He claimed resource communities were “being lied to” by the major parties, noting the Australian Energy Market Operator (Aemo) had forecast the closure of more than half the nation’s coal generation capacity by 2030, and virtually all capacity by the early 2040s.

Bandt said the Greens’ policy would support that rapid transition away from coal by underwriting half the wage of affected workers for a decade, under a “job for job guarantee” planned to encourage employees to seek new positions – particularly in related fields such as energy and rare metals.

“In many places around the country the best job for a coal worker is another mining job,” he said.

“There are enormous opportunities in developing critical minerals and green metal processing. Australia doesn’t need to shut down the mining industry, we’ve just got to get out of coal.”

A $2.8bn fund to diversify coal communities would give out grants to towns to encourage new start-ups, clean industry or upgrade infrastructure to aid in transitioning from fossil fuel reliance.

The Greens also propose setting up new local authorities in resource-heavy regions including the Hunter Valley, Collie, Bowen Basin and Gladstone, plus expanding an existing authority in the LaTrobe Valley, to help develop such transition or revitalisation plans.

The party’s policy documents set out the plan in a conciliatory tone, claiming that “coal workers haven’t caused the climate crisis”.

“Workers are doing what they can to support themselves and their family. The Greens want to preserve the contributions they have made into their communities over decades,” the document continues.

“Instead of leaving their fate in the hands of overseas boardrooms of big corporations, the Greens plan gives local communities control over their future.”

The latest tranche of Greens election policy comes as the party looks to differentiate itself at the coming election against the Climate 200 independents campaigning on environmental and accountability policies.

Any substantial vote swing to Labor and against the Coalition government could also see some Greens votes sucked away, in the possibility of a consolidation of support behind the major centre-left party.

The Greens are targeting 10 seats in Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales, and Bandt claims they are “very close or have our noses in front” in five – the Labor-held Griffith, Macnamara and Richmond, plus the Coalition seats of Ryan and Brisbane.

Bandt denied the Climate 200 independents had taken oxygen from the Greens, saying his party would continue to campaign strongly on environmental issues, but that there would be a stronger push on issues of social democracy – headlined by a renewed push to force the very wealthy and big corporations to “pay their fair share of tax”.

Bandt claimed the tax push, plus calls to end subsidies to fossil fuel companies, would raise nearly $100bn over the next decade, which he said was enough to fund other core Greens calls such as extending Medicare to cover dental and mental health.

Bandt said the Greens wanted to see a change of government to Labor. His most optimistic campaign outcome would see them win an extra three Senate seats – in NSW, South Australia and Queensland – to take their upper-house representation to 12.

This could give the party the sole balance of power, a position Bandt said he would use to “push” a Labor government to adopt more progressive positions on climate and social issues.

“As well as kicking the Liberals out, we need Greens in balance of power to keep Labor honest,” he said.

“We will push the next government to go further and faster on coal and gas, and inequality.”

Links - Greens Party Relevant Climate Policies

• Greens Election Policy Platform
• Tackling The Climate Crisis
• Climate Change and Energy
• 15 big ideas to fight for the future
• A Bold Build for a Strong, Clean Economy
• Protecting the Environment and Animals

(Washington Post) Brazil Mudslides: Climate Change Turns Favelas Into Disasters Waiting To Happen

Washington Post - Terrence McCoy

Priscila Neves, 38, searches the wreckage of her favela for her father's body after last week's landslide. (Terrence McCoy/The Washington Post)

REPORT AUDIO 8min 49sec

PETRÓPOLIS, Brazil — High above the city, in a wash of mud and rubble, Priscila Neves stood where her parents’ house should have been, waiting for her fears to be confirmed.

At her feet was a mess of clothing, lacquered in mud and half-buried. “My mother’s blouse,” she said, pointing at one item. Then at another: “My father’s shirt.”

Her mother’s body had been found the day before, far from the broken vestiges of her red-brick house.

The avalanche of mud that came through here last week, destroying everything in its path, had arrived with such force that it had carried her body hundreds of yards, depositing it far below, at the base of the mountain. Neves now had little hope that her father had survived. She just wanted to find his body.

She closed her eyes and took an accounting of loss: Gone were 10 relatives, many more friends and her childhood home. But she had already decided she wouldn’t leave this cliffside community where she herself had narrowly missed being killed.

“Where would I go?” said Neves, 38. “You could decide to leave this neighborhood because of a landslide, only to arrive in another, just in time for another landslide.”

Brazil, like much of the world, is increasingly being forced to reckon with the everyday impacts of climate change. Scientists say it is largely responsible for the extreme weather events that have recently struck the country — first intense droughts, then punishing rains, and now flooding from north to south that has left hundreds dead.

Late on the afternoon of Feb. 15, in the cloud-cloaked mountains of Petrópolis, a historic city 44 miles northeast of Rio de Janeiro, there began a downpour. Within hours, a month’s worth of rain had saturated the city.

The surge unleashed floods and mudslides that killed nearly 200 people, disappeared hundreds more — and made starkly clear how defenseless the favelas of Brazil will be in a new era of destabilizing climate change.

Alex Sandro Conde's house stands next to the devastation caused by a landslide at Morro da Oficina, a hillside portion of Alto da Serra in Petrópolis. Conde lost his son Kaique, 18, when the place where they both worked was destroyed by a landslide after heavy rains last week. (Silvia Izquierdo/AP)

The precarious, impoverished communities, which often spill across sheer ridges, in defiance of geography and gravity, are the country’s most distinguishing architectural feature.

They have always suffered disproportionately during natural disasters. But as rains and floods increase in frequency and ferocity, scientists expect them to become still more vulnerable to tragedy.

“This is a ticking time bomb,” said Marcelo Fischer Gramani, a geologist at the Institute for Technological Research in São Paulo. “And it’s already beginning to explode.”

Brazil now has a problem that many here fear is impossible to solve. In a country of profound inequality and widespread poverty, the poor have long been locked out of the formal housing market, clustering together in often unsafe locations.

The nation does not have the resources, the logistical capacity or the political will to relocate the estimated 4 million Brazilians in areas of risk, housing analysts say, let alone adresss the underlying social issues that first gave rise to the favelas.

So instead, people wait for the next disaster.

This was the future Neves considered as she searched the muck for her father’s body.

“Nowhere is safe,” she said.

A housing crisis long ignored

The story of the favela always begins with need.

Without anywhere to go, the homeless and dispossessed descend upon a piece of land and, with little or no risk analysis, begin to fortify it. First comes an assembly of hovels. Then plumbing, electricity, cable television, brick houses and, eventually, schools and businesses.

Between 1985 and 2020, the amount of land occupied by favelas in Brazil nearly doubled as the country failed to address inequalities that, historians say, have grown out of its past as the principal destination of enslaved Africans in the Western Hemisphere.

Emergency workers pull the body of a man from the wreckage. (Terrence McCoy/The Washington Post)

In 1888, Brazil, the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery, freed enslaved Africans — but gave them nowhere to live.

Along the sheer hills surrounding the Rio de Janeiro wharf, where many of them first reached Brazil, rose the country’s first favelas. Those communities are still filled with people — many of whom have neither the capital nor the credit to enter the country’s formal housing market.

“Brazil has never given much of its population any type of access to land ownership,” said Isadora de Andrade Guerreiro, a professor of architecture and urbanism at the University of São Paulo.

“People live in the informal economy so there’s no way for them to get financing. So when you have vacant areas, people without anywhere to go will go and occupy them.”

Once people are settled, moving them out of their homes — even when the land on which they’re built is clearly not suitable for habitation — is extremely difficult. People assume the risk not because they’re unaware of it, housing analysts say, but because they have no other choice.

The neighborhood is close to work. Their kids are in school nearby. Even if they were to leave the house, someone else would move in.

“This isn’t someone who doesn’t know that there isn’t risk,” said Leonardo Freitas, who helped write a 2019 Rio de Janeiro city report on flooding. “This is someone who wants a home. They know something could happen one day, but hope it doesn’t.”

In January 2011, in the mountain range north of Rio, more rain fell in 24 hours than was expected for the entire month. Landslides and floods killed more than 900 people across several towns. In the years afterward, in flood-prone Petrópolis, officials released several risk assessment reports.

The findings were bleak: Nearly one-fifth of the city was either vulnerable or extremely vulnerable to additional disasters. More than 7,100 families should be resettled.

But few were ever moved — a failure now exacerbated by the mounting impacts of climate change. Rain itself has begun to change in Brazil — not in annual volume, but in the form it takes. Showers increasingly come down in machine-gun bursts — gushers that bring weeks’ worth of rain in hours.

In São Paulo, the largest city in the Americas, the number of days per year with four inches of rainfall has more than tripled in the past two decades. A similar trend has been seen in other state capitals.

“The rains are more intense, more rapid and stronger,” said Christovam Barcellos, a climatologist at the research institute Fiocruz. “This is a sign of climate change: It was once rare for it to rain this way, but it has become much less rare.”

‘I heard all of their screams’

At the top of a mountain above Petrópolis, a teenage girl was lying in bed listening to music when she noticed the downpour still hadn’t let up.

Eduarda Souza, 16, got up and went to the window. She could barely see the city far below, but she felt safe up here. The mountainside above the house looked sturdy and, she thought, unlikely to give way. She went back to listening to music. Then she heard a terrible noise.

It sounded as if the land was opening up. The ground shook. She ran outside for a better view. It was difficult to believe: The entire mountainside was sliding away. The ground had turned into a rush of mud, plunging toward her neighbors’ homes.

“I heard all of their screams,” she said. “But then the wave hit, and the screams stopped.”

Davidson da Silva Mello's house just missed being flattened. He swears he will never live on a mountainside again. (Terrence McCoy/The Washington Post)

Her father, Davidson da Silva Mello, 40, was down in the chaos of the city. He had been busy working his job, picking up cans to recycle at markets and restaurants, when the landslides began to cascade.

He called his wife, who was home with his three children.

In the background of the call, he heard a thunderous sound. His wife yelled: “What is happening, what is happening, what is happening?” Then the line dropped.

Convinced his entire family had just been killed, he raced up the mountain. When he got to his community, he felt a swell of relief. His wife and children were sheltering in a day-care center. The mudslide had come within feet of flattening the house, but had largely rushed past it.

Now, days afterward, he was approaching the structure, trying to gather the courage to go inside. He went to the door and struggled to open it. Mud had infiltrated the house. He turned away, unable to confront the scene: The mud had risen to three feet. The sofa, cabinets, television — all their possessions were either buried or destroyed.

“I can’t look,” Mello said.

Mello's home was overwhelmed by mud. (Terrence McCoy/The Washington Post)

He walked outside and struggled to gather himself. He was done with life on the mountainside. It didn’t matter if they had to move out of the city — he wasn’t putting his family in danger anymore. His only hope here was that the city would come and destroy what was left of this house.

“Or,” he predicted, “there will soon be someone else living in it.”

Links

• Brazil: Climate change, neglect contribute to deadly mudslides
• Death toll mounts from flash floods, landslides in Brazil’s Petropolis
• Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon hits new record in January
• Deadly Petropolis Mudslide: Poverty and Climate Disaster
• International to Local Perspectives on Brazil's Climate Change Stance
• The Politics and Policies of Climate Change in Brazil
• Floundering in the polls, Brazil’s Bolsonaro woos a surprising new demographic: The poor
• Bolsonaro said his hands-off pandemic response would protect Brazil’s poor. But they’ve ended up suffering the most.
• 10 steps you can take to lower your carbon footprint