Filed under: Adaptations Financing | Tags: Bangladesh, climate debt, LDC interests
THIS week, New Age reported that tensions have peaked between the environment ministry and the Economic Resources Division of the finance ministry after the latter expressed a sudden interest to negotiate for World Bank loans to tackle climate change. According to the report, the ERD – Bangladesh’s foreign assistance gatekeeper under the finance ministry – is keen to avail loans from a multi-donor trust fund operated by the World Bank, while the environment ministry insists that foreign assistance in the area of climate change should predominantly be in the form of non-repayable aid and grants.
The ERD is perhaps unaware that in its keenness to flex its muscles in attracting climate change funding, it has contravened one of the principled positions that Bangladesh has taken at various times in international climate negotiations. It has consistently been Bangladesh’s position as a member of the least developed countries group at global negotiations, that developed countries – whose industrial excesses are largely to blame for global warming – must compensate the LDCs and the developing world for the climate cataclysms that they are now experiencing. This is premised on the idea that 140 million Bangladeshis should not have to pay with lives, livelihoods, and destitution, for the environmental consequences of the industrialisation of Western Europe, the US and a clutch of other countries over the past century. In that sense, Bangladesh and the members of the LDC group, as well as a number of small-island states have a moral claim on cash compensations that cannot be hinged on conditionalities that typically accompany traditional grants and aid.
In an interview with New Age ahead of the high-profile Bali climate change summit last year, the environment adviser CS Karim rightly invoked the ‘polluter pays’ principle to justify this position that Bangladesh had adopted and continues to campaign for. ‘They owe us compensation as we are prime victims of a crime that we had no part in,’ Karim told New Age. This idea is also the basis for Article 4.3 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change – the core document which sets the terms of reference for all global negotiations on climate change. Furthermore, Bangladesh also leads the LDC group in its political negotiations at the annual Conference of Parties, and it would be foolhardy for the country to risk alienation in the LDC group by availing loans for adaptation funding, when it has played such a strong role in the past in dismissing the idea of loan financing for adaptations. So, while the ERD clearly has expertise in handling the foreign assistance that Bangladesh receives in other areas, it should learn to take the cue from its colleagues in the environment ministry in order to avoid risking Bangladesh’s standing at international negotiations for a pittance in World Bank loans.
The conflict is not unexpected, and it certainly has been brewing awhile, indicative of the end of an era. The environment ministry has, over the past two decades, developed a certain expertise in dealing with the issue of climate change, and has a historical understanding of Bangladesh’s position at international negotiations on climate change. But, as governments across the world are learning, climate change is no longer an issue that concerns any single line ministry exclusively, and calls for a far more holistic developmental view of the challenges. In the coming decades the whole spectrum of government ministries and agencies will have to face up to the fallout from climate change in their relevant areas of work. As a rise in global temperatures causes crop failures or falling yields requiring action from the agricultural ministry, the health ministry will find malaria or dengue morbidity rising, and the disaster management ministry will find itself tackling a rising frequency of tropical cyclones along the coast. And that’s just a few predictable outcomes of only one of the gamut of climate variations that countries like Bangladesh will encounter. This means, it is becoming increasingly crucial that governments such as ours adopt training programmes to help bureaucrats across the board attain a more nuanced understanding of climate change, building on the general doomsday scenario of coming floods, cyclones and droughts that they currently might have.
The reason this inter-ministerial coordination is fast becoming an imperative also has to do with Bangladesh’s profile as a climate change victim. In the past year, since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a series of reports affirming that the science of global warming is as robust as can be, Bangladesh has received widespread media attention as the country that will confront some of the biggest challenges posed by global warming. With the heightened call for global action on climate change, the amount of foreign assistance available to tackle climate change has been steadily rising, especially for Bangladesh, with a scrum of NGOs eager to be seen funding climate research or action in the disaster-prone country. Given this scenario, the ERD requires specific sensitisation on why it is important that we are selective in whom we accept assistance from, and what form this assistance can take. In 2007, Bangladesh spent $1,551.3 million in hard-earned foreign currency on servicing its external debts – roughly 18 per cent of total government expenditure. During that same year, public spending on education and health were 16.5 per cent and 7.4 per cent respectively – revealing the extent to which a debt trap can cripple the development of a country. For every dollar in foreign grant aid received, the government spends over $1.5 in debt service to foreign creditors annually, a 2003 study revealed. In such a scenario, it is difficult to grant the ERD the benefit of doubt for its evident inability to fathom the economic consequences of the new debt it seeks to create, especially since the World Bank is known to have significant sway in the ERD’s decision-making process.
Most of all, it is important for all government agencies to realise that the World Bank’s role in disbursing loans and grants faces widespread criticism in the group that Bangladesh leads. Our own experience with the bank has been no sweeter either; between 1980 and 1990 – during a decade of military dictatorships characterised by rampant corruption and political oppression – Bangladesh’s debt figure tripled to $12,439 million, with the bulk of this surge in lending to autocratic regimes coming from the International Development Association, the soft-loan window of the World Bank. It is also a fact that as one of the three implementing agencies of the Global Environment Facility which has hitherto been responsible for dispensing funds for adaptations measures in the LDCs and the developing world, the bank has a controversial track record. Members of the LDC group have time and again pointed out that the bureaucracy and the technical requirements that needed fulfilling to qualify for such funding was often rigged against the least developed world. So much so that the Bali Summit last year saw immense pressure from the G77 group and the LDC’s to place future adaptations funding beyond the ambit of GEF control.
Negotiations are currently ongoing to determine the nature and the format that future adaptations funding will take in a post-2012 era after the Kyoto Protocol expires. As one of the countries of the LDC group that is seen to have a strong moral case for demanding compensations and non-repayable assistance to tackle the fallout of climate change, Bangladeshi bureaucrats must realise that they are also burdened with a grave responsibility which they must not squander in our interests, and as a leader of those who share those interests.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Massive government subsidies for biofuels are not helping to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, according to an OECD report released Wednesday.
The U.S., EU and Canada spent €11 billion (US$17.6 billion) in public money to support energy crops in 2006 — and will more than double that over the next 10 years, according to estimates by the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
But this failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from transport by more than 1 percent, the OECD said — recommending that governments would see more savings from a lower-cost push toward cutting energy use overall.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2008/07/16/business/EU-OECD-Biofuels.php
Interesting article by Bjorn Lomborg, possibly the most high profile skeptic in the world today. While i do agree that doomsday climate change scenarios are thrown about too willy-nilly, i think its a problem of the press rather than that of scientists. I also disagree with Lomborg that the sudden appetite for biofuels is driven by a desire for a greener economy. In the US at least, the surge in biofuels subsidies is likely the Bush administration’s strategy to protect US energy security as fuel prices soar with little indication that they’ll be coming down anytime soon. While the administration may cite climate change as a justification, even Lomborg cant be so naive as to believe that the country that has undermined Kyoto and its possible successor would suddenly opt for a major policy shift in the structure of its national fuel use, based on ‘the hyperventilations of a bunch of bleeding hearts and hippies.’
Also, i do remember reading somewhere that the earth has indeed experienced cooling over the past few years, largely because of a sudden surge in volcanic eruptions and the resultant ash that is suspended in the atmosphere.
Anyway – its all yours to read on…
Al Gore and the green inquisition
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/rss/eo20080716a1.html
Consider one of the most significant steps taken to respond to climate change. Adopted because of the climate panic, biofuels were supposed to reduce COe emissions. Hansen described them as part of a “brighter future for the planet.” But using biofuels to fight climate change must rate as one of the worst global “solutions” to any great challenge in recent times.
Biofuels essentially take food from mouths and puts it into cars. The grain required to fill the tank of an SUV with ethanol is enough to feed one African for a year. Thirty percent of this year’s corn production in the United States will be burned up on America’s highways. This has been possible only through subsidies that globally will total $15 billion this year alone.
Because increased demand for biofuels leads to cutting down carbon-rich forests, a 2008 Science study showed that the net effect of using them is not to cut COe emissions, but to double them. The rush toward biofuels has also strongly contributed to rising food prices, which have tipped another roughly 30 million people into starvation.
Because of climate panic, our attempts to mitigate climate change have provoked a disaster. We will waste hundreds of billions of dollars, worsen global warming, and dramatically increase starvation.
Filed under: Climate Change and South Asia | Tags: Bangladesh, Climate Change, India, SAARC, South Asia
South Asian environment ministers met in Dhaka last week and hammered out a declaration calling for greater cooperation and unity in addressing climate change in the region. The Dhaka Declaration, announced from the forum of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation includes a climate change action plan which, among other things, envisions greater collaboration in disaster preparedness and responses in the SAARC region.
While the idea of a common SAARC platform on climate change may be one that appeals to the ideals of regional solidarity and integration, it looks likely that on the area of climate change, as with trade, Bangladesh may stand to gain very little by joining together with a developing nation like India whose priorities and agenda in international negotiations are contradictory to our own. We as Bangladeshis have justifiable reason to be aggrieved that the SAARC Dhaka Declaration on climate change fails to address one of the most significant aspects of global warming i.e. the task of mitigations or cuts in the emissions of greenhouse gases. The likely reason, the SAARC document bypasses this issue, is because India – one of the most powerful players in the SAARC forum – wants to avoid addressing its own responsibilities in cutting emissions. In fact, not only did the document fail to mention that this was one area where the SAARC members could not agree, the Chief Adviser to the military-controlled interim government only mentioned that it was the developed countries who had the responsibility of carrying out mitigation efforts.
True, all the countries in the SAARC region are essentially victims of climate change caused by the indiscriminate use of fossil fuels by the industrialised countries of the North. As a region the extreme weather events such as floods, droughts, heat waves and cyclones that we are likely to encounter with increasing frequency and intensity ties these neighbouring countries in a common thread. The Maldives and Bangladesh are likely to see large swathes of its landmass inundated with rising sea levels, Nepal will likely face receding glaciers and glacial-lake outburst floods with increasing frequency, large swathes of India will see desertification and loss of crop yields, while others will see too much rain. And yet, speaking objectively, Bangladesh is better off building rapport with the other members of the group of Least Developed Countries that it has led and chaired at UN negotiations on climate change, with India negotiating as a member of the Developing Countries group. One of the reasons is that India, unlike Bangladesh, believes that the developing countries e.g itself, Brazil and China have the right to develop and industrialise as the West has done, before they commit to emissions cuts of greenhouse gases. In fact this has been the principal strategy that the US and India and China have almost used in tandem to undermine the emissions caps that the 1997 Kyoto Protocol mandated. While the US, under the Bush administration, refused to come on board citing the protocol’s exemption granted to developing countries to emit without caps until 2012, India and China have consistently demanded that the West cannot deny them the same opportunities to develop and emerge out of poverty as they had.
For Bangladesh – especially its technocrats and scientists – it is important to understand two things very clearly. Firstly, Bangladesh’s profile as a victim of climate change is fast peaking, and if it is to extract a reasonably beneficial outcome from the yet to be decided content of the successor to the Kyoto Protocol for a post-2012 era, it must be careful not to alienate other LDC countries by pandering to bilateral interests. Today, India is the fourth largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, in absolute terms, with China occupying top spot. If the developing countries do continue emitting at the current rate, for say, a few more decades, it may not be enough for Bangladesh’s survival that developed countries cut emissions drastically. As scientists have repeatedly warned, global warming should be seen as a massive ship whose direction cannot be changed easily; a ship that continues to move for a while on momentum even after the engines have been switched off. For Bangladesh which is expected to be worst affected by a sea level rise, will it matter that the emissions that caused global warming originated in India rather than the US? Hardly.
The second important point that the Bangladesh government should recognise is that the strategy of saying different things at different forums in a bid to earn applause is not as harmless as it seems. When the chief adviser to the military-controlled interim government, Dr Fakhruddin Ahmed spoke at a high level meeting in the US last September, he said, ‘Scientists have long warned us that a ‘business as usual’ approach will not reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Drastic measures are now required. Unless we stem the tide of emissions, the increase in global temperatures and sea levels may accelerate. We urge all major emitters to collectively establish and implement a global target to stabilize the atmosphere over the short, medium and long term.’ This was perfectly in line with Bangladesh and its LDC colleagues’ position that all major emitters regardless of their economic status must accept responsibility for emissions cuts. But when Ahmed inaugurated the SAARC ministers’ meet earlier this month, the emphasis was on the industrialised West providing adequate funds for adaptation, with no mention of the emitters’ mitigation responsibilities, as reported in the media. Bangladesh is one of the most high profile stakeholders in the outcome of climate change negotiations. Until now it has failed to use this to its advantage, and has equally failed to espouse a consistent political position on the issue at UN negotiations, mostly because our strategy on climate change is largely determined by technocrats without any participation from public representatives.
Because of the technical nature of the subject, and the fact that it is only coming into prominence now, climate change has been an issue which has had very little currency in the political arena. This has perhaps suited the NGOs working with climate change in Bangladesh better than they had expected, with the national agenda on climate change hijacked by a fast expanding group of foreign and local NGOs. While this is not necessarily a negative reality, given that most of the expertise on climate change has been developed at the non-governmental level, and most of the noise on Bangladesh’s plight has, without a doubt, been created by them, the time has come to widen the mandate on what Bangladesh’s international position should be. For this to happen, it is the government that needs to start building understanding and opinion on climate change from the bottom up. We must recognise the resonance that this opinion-building exercise will have amongst rural, agrarian, communities across Bangladesh, who are sensing more than any of us, and without the aid of scientific reports, that climate variability is increasing and wreaking havoc on the agricultural calendar. It is not enough for an elite team of Bangladeshis to understand climate change and negotiate well at the international level. Ordinary Bangladeshis have a right to know why their crop yields are falling, floods are increasing, rainfall is erratic and the dry season becoming drier but warmer. And they have a right to know what their government is doing about it. Climate change is no longer the exclusive terrain of the scientists – as its effects are being felt, the mandate for action must be widened through its emergence as a political issue rather than a scientific one.
