Climate change: Looking south

Editorial
The Guardian, Monday 30 November 2009
The impact of climate change on the developing world is already so far advanced it can no longer be prevented, only mitigated. It can be seen in the increased frequency of flooding in Bangladesh, or the desertification of sub-Saharan Africa. But it is also being experienced by millions of families and individuals, the smallholder farmers, the people who grow four-fifths of the world's food. From every part of Africa there are reports of erratic rains, lower yields and higher incidence of disease. For some of them, insecurity is not only about a shortage of food and water but about a life-threatening recurrence of insurrection and lawlessness as the poorest people on the planet rob the very slightly less poor to survive.
Unless there is huge collective effort at Copenhagen all these small experiences will snowball. Within a generation, there could be wholesale migrations of peoples whose lands have become unviable or who have been displaced by resource wars; and there will be widespread loss of life through flood, drought and epidemic. This wretched vision of the future is not revelatory. It has been acknowledged for years. Yet the high hopes of a coherent, funded effort that would spread clean technology through the developing world, while supporting subsistence farmers to adapt new methods to improve sustainability, have been bogged down in a mess of broken promises and mistrust, and a miasma of acronyms and initials.
Setting targets for cutting emissions has had most of the headlines in the north, where mitigation seems a less pressing problem. Without the pressure of public scrutiny, it has been easy for governments to avoid working out who is to pay the south. Yet hardly a week passes without a new assessment of the likely cost of avoiding, or at least containing, disaster. The latest, from Christian Aid on Friday, thought that in the very best case Africa alone would lose 1.7% of its GDP – $26bn – a year. The sooner a start is made, the less painful it should be. That is one reason to welcome yesterday's agreement at the Commonwealth summit on climate change. Britain and France launched a fund, expected to reach $10bn a year by 2012, to help poorer nations reduce emissions and deal with the consequences of a changing climate. The challenge is to ensure the money materialises, and that, if it does, it is not wasted.
Over the past eight years so many different funds and programmes have been initiated that even government officials struggle to order them. The UN offers, among others, the Less Developed Countries Fund and the Special Climate Change Fund, while the UK government has contributed most (but only £200m) to the Climate Change Resilience pilot. The World Bank proposes loans, political anathema to many developing countries still recovering from the withdrawal of government from many areas of state activity (such as agriculture) under its instructions, and has battled to get strong representation on the Adaptation Fund set up at Kyoto to disburse income raised by carbon trading from south to north. But the global downturn has illustrated the weaknesses of market-based mechanisms.
Global institutions are right to demand that resources on such a vast scale are distributed fairly. But agreeing an acceptable process is turning into an insurmountable barrier, even if donor countries had provided funds to distribute in the first place. Developing countries now argue for income from a levy on air transport and shipping. A proposal from Norway (pdf) for auctions of emission allowances has the backing of some NGOs. What the past years of confusion suggest is the pressing need for organisational harmonisation, a single body that can raise and distribute resources fairly and transparently. As we report today, the stakes have never been higher: for the north, it means economically sustainable growth; but for the south it is about life and death.