Adaptation
to Climate Change in Developing Countries
Climate change
increasingly brings serious threats to the livelihoods, safety,
poverty reduction and future economic development prospects of
the poorest and most vulnerable areas of the world, the
developing countries. As the majority
of developing countries are in tropical and sub-tropical
regions, these areas are likely to be seriously impacted
by climate change. Large areas in Asia, Africa,
Latin American and the Small Island States (ie Mauritius) have been indentified by the United Nations,
the World Bank and other international agencies as among the
most vulnerable regions. And these developing countries are further at risk due
to the limited resources and capabilities of governments as well
as the
poor to cope with adverse
climate impacts.
As shown recent
history, poverty exacerbates, and is exacerbated by, the
negative impacts of environmental change. During the decade of
the 1990’s, 97% of all natural disaster-related deaths occurred
in developing countries, with 90% of these
being climate, weather and water related. The Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change reported that the number of
hydro-meteorological disasters is especially troubling, as these
event have doubled in last five years. Not
withstanding the recent earthquake devastation in Haiti, threats
from geological hazards have remained the same. As over half the
world’s population becomes increasingly urbanized, the rise in
hydro-metrological disasters (such cyclones, floods, heat-waves,
drought, and rain-induced landslides) will be posing an even
greater threat to the lives, livelihood and natural ecosystems
of many of the world’s major population centers, especially in
the developing world.
Governments and People Unable
to Cope
The climate
change threats to the world’s concentrations of urban poor
should be increasingly of concern to the international community, as these are the most
vulnerable groups having least capacity to adapt.
According to UN estimates, as many
as 1.3 billion people are living in extreme poverty, daily
struggling to live on less than $1 per day. Settlements composed
of thousands of poorly constructed shanties are often found
on geologically unstable hillsides, marginal flood prone
coastal areas and in river basins that are at heightened risk
due climate
change events. With limited individual resources and poor
governmental support capacities for responding to floods,
droughts, riverbank erosion, typhoons and landslides and other
climate related events, the poor are presented with even greater
burdens.
These additional burdens exacerbate their already existing deprivations
and
vulnerabilities - thus further widening development opportunity
disparities between the third world poor and the
developed world.
Due to the lack of
governmental response capacity, the poor within the developing
countries, especially those in the Least Developed Countries (LDC’s)
already are struggling to cope with the impacts of extreme
weather events, natural hazards and changing climate. The
earthquakes of early 2010 in Haiti, preceded by the severe
hurricanes a few years earlier, caused deaths in the hundreds of
thousands and massive damage to infrastructure and housing which
were already seriously dilapidated. The large scale settlements
shanties in
countries such as flood-prone Mozambique, drought-prone
Sudan and cyclone-prone Bangladesh are prime examples of the
world’s poorest populations increased vulnerability to climate
change events. For example, in 2004 the severe
monsoon rains in Bangladesh induced massive flooding killing hundreds
while also displacing over 20 million people. As shown by the
increasing volume of research by the World Bank and the UN, climate change impacts in the
poorest countries are likely to seriously detract from the
global community's ambitious efforts of achieve the Millennium
Development Goals (MDGs), which seek to eradicate extreme
poverty and hunger by 2015.
Adaptation Efforts: Beyond Mitigation
Policies
The scale of action
needed to effectively tackle the massive climate change impacts
expected is unprecedented and involves two concurrently linked
action approaches within the international community:
•Mitigation actions:
those efforts that seek to help slow the causes of climate
change, such as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and
•Adaptation actions:
those efforts that seek to minimize the negative consequences of
climate change on the various environmental, economic, social
and ecological systems impacted.
Mitigation has
received the most international attention, from the press as
well as from governments of the developed countries. Governments
and development agencies, however, are now beginning to address
climate change adaptation as a distinct program focus.
Adaptation to date has not been addressed as a separate
policy and program focus but rather as a key climate change issue, which along with
mitigation, must be a prime focus within all international agency
development and environmental programs. Most national governments and
international agencies now are stressing that without such integration,
adaptation as well as mitigation actions will likely undermine
the effectiveness of either. However, as cited below, adaptation
programs have yet to receive the specific funding focus needed
to meet the increasing LDC needs.
Identifying
Adaptation Measures By Sector
As input preparation
to the recent rather ineffectual December 2009 global climate change
negotiations in Copenhagen, in 2008 the World Bank initiated an
important study, the Economics of Adaptation to
Climate Change (EACC). Funded by the United
Kingdom, the Netherlands and Switzerland, the
study sought to develop estimates of adaptation costs for developing
countries, thus assisting these countries to understand not only
the costs but the risks posed by climate change. This
information is important it that it can assist developing countries as well as the
international institutions in formulating the most effective
strategies for adapting to climate change impacts. The Bank's
summary of the various
types of climate change adaptation measures by sector likely
needed by developing countries is shown in the table
below.
Adaptation Costs:
Summary of Key Recent Research
Although numerous
measurement, parameter definition and analysis difficulties are
involved in seeking determine adaptation costs, the World Bank
2008 study did
produce results which appear within the realm of of previous
adaptation studies by the UN, EU and others. In broad outlines, the
study concluded the following: should the global temperature
increases by 2 degrees centigrade within the next forty years
(between 2010 and 2050), the
adaptation costs alone for developing countries (not counting
other essential poverty reduction programs) would range from $75
to $100 billion per year. An important comparison note is that
this amount is roughly equal to the total amount
of foreign aid currently being provided yearly by developed
countries to the developing world.
In an earlier 2007
report by the UN (the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change) their analysis compared the
various ranges of adaptation costs by sector for developing countries,
produced by earlier studies by the National Center for
Atmospheric Research and the Commonwealth Scientific and
Industrial Research Organization. These results are shown in the table below.
Again
from the the World Bank’s
2007 study, their table below shows an estimate of developing country adaptation costs in
various regions of the world.
Adaptation Financing
for Developing Countries: Status of the International Funding
Support
The UNFCCC has
established several relevant funds:
the Adaptation Fund,
the Least Developed
Countries Fund (LDC), and
the Special Climate Change
(SCC) Fund.
The
Adaptation Fund is planned to be financed by a tax on the Clean
Development Mechanism. The LDC and the SCC are multilateral
funds directed by the
United Nations
Framework Convention on Climate Change's (UNFCCC) financial mechanism, the Global Environment Facility.
The Global
Environment Facility permits industrialized countries to acquire and
trade Certified Emission Reductions credits. This is done
by implementing projects, whether in developed or developing countries,
where the credits are used to towards achieving greenhouse gas emissions
targets.
According to the
World Bank study, other Climate (Change) Investment Funds (CIF)
are based on joint efforts between multilateral development
banks and developed countries. These voluntary funds purposes
are to bridge the financing and
disparity between present needs and a global climate finance
framework being currently negotiated under the auspices of the UNFCCC.
Any resulting
contribution
are treated as "Official Development Assistance" by
the Development Assistance Committee of the
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD),
which represents the major developed countries.
There are additional non-climate specific assistance
programs overseen by the OEDC Development Assistance Committee.
These include technical assistance, grants and concessional lending for climate-friendly projects.
Various
philanthropic foundation and private corporations also provide
substantial developing country financial assistance, although the
magnitude of assistance to climate change activities
has yet to be determined.
Financing; Conclusions and Suggestions
The current
efforts to fund climate change activities are poorly monitored
and coordinated, exceedingly complex and opaque, and generally not based
on specifically defined international aid programs. As such,
there needs to be established new specifically defined
climate-change related funding mechanisms, perhaps organized and
administered by the
UNFCCC. While adaptation funding should be
coordinate with other aid assistance programs, experience to date with the various efforts
mentioned above suggests that relying on the on-goingnt programs
and activities of the current bilateral and
multilateral institutions has rendered the accounting for
specific climate-related
programs difficult if not impossible.
(For further references to climate change
funding, see the
IRINNEWS site:
Approach to Determining Adaptation
Strategies and Action Programs
A useful
"adaptation" framework
developed by the UN for organizing the
various steps needed in determining the types, costs and actions
needed from various stakeholders within each developing country
is diagramed below.
This form of "consultative process"
approach, which emphasized inclusion of the many stakeholders
within the various country regions, is believed key to
formulating and implementing any effective country or city
adaptation program. Local communities, NGO's, sectoral experts,
local and national governmental officials, the private sector
and various country donor and international aid agencies all
have roles in helping determining the most effective, context
appropriate and implementable adaptation solutions and action
programs. Although this consultative process approach is the
basic "models" emphasized for development assistance by almost
all international aid organizations, actual effective
results-driven implementation of an all stakeholder "inclusive"
process is far from easy. Experience has shown however, that
without such an inclusive effort, timely achievment of specific
adaptation program objectives and performance targets is
unlikely at best.
