Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1
- 19)
TUESDAY 15 JANUARY 2002
MR RICHARD
MANNING, MR
ANDREW BENNETT,
MR ADRIAN
DAVIS AND
MR DAVID
WARRILOW
Chairman
1. Good morning. Mr Manning, thank you very
much for coming this morning with your colleagues. As the record
shows, you are the Director-General, Resources at DFID, Andrew
Bennett is the Chief Natural Resources Adviser, Adrian Davis is
the Head, Environment Policy Department and Mr Warrilow, you are
from DEFRA. Would you just like to tell us your role there?
(Mr Warrilow) My role is to provide scientific advice
on climate change and to ensure that the scientific and technical
aspects cover IPCC for example.
Chairman: I should just like to read
you a bit of our brief because we have quite a long brief. If
I read you what our agenda is, then that might help you in terms
of answering the questions. We shall try to keep our questions
as short as possible. It would be useful if this evidence session
could help: to understand how DFID deals with an issue whose nature
and impact is uncertain; to understand how much DFID knows about
climate change and the impact of its projects and programmes relating
to climate change; to determine whether DFID is able to forecast
the level of effort it will have to put into dealing with climate
change issues; to understand what role DFID intends to play in
mainstreaming climate change considerations; to discover whether
enough is known to be able to enact strategies to help mainstreaming
now. The DFID memorandum talks in general terms about what DFID
is doing but has few real examples of work which is being undertaken.
It would be helpful if during the course of the evidence session
the witnesses could be encouraged to give actual examples to illustrate
what DFID is doing. Wherever possible, if you could give current
examples that would be much appreciated. For example, paragraph
3 of DFID's memorandum lists reasons why environmental considerations
have failed to be incorporated into sustainable development but
gives no examples. At paragraph 13, it gives no examples of how
it is helping countries to integrate environmental issues into
Poverty Reduction Strategy Programmes (PRSPs). It does not include
any examples to illustrate the kind of work the multilateral agencies
DFID is partnered with are carrying out as part of the poverty-environment
partnership. At paragraph 26 DFID outlines some work it intends
to do raising awareness and describes a "portable model"
to assist with planning. Examples of how this might work could
be useful. Paragraphs 27-29 deal with mitigation but again give
no concrete examples of the actions DFID is taking. I hope that
gives a flavour. What we are keen to do is try to relate the general
principles to the exact policy work which you are doing.
Mr Khabra
2. This session is on the Committee's inquiry
into global climate change and sustainable development and trying
to find out what DFID is doing. Some of the questions will be
to identify who is vulnerable. Where are the vulnerable livelihoods
and which countries has DFID prioritised for action? How does
DFID identify vulnerable communities and vulnerable countries?
Is DFID's assessment of vulnerability based only on current environmental
risks such as: threats to livelihoods, environmental degradation
or natural resource depletion; or is account taken of future risks
arising from climate change?
(Mr Manning) We take as our basis the work which is
being done internationally by the IPCC and you have attached to
our memorandum the summary of how the IPCC feel that the regional
impact will be felt. We take that as the basis for looking at
this. Our mandate in DFID is to try to act on world poverty. What
we see is that on the whole the most vulnerable people are likely
to be the poor people. We see that partly because the regional
spread of effects given by the IPCC shows more negative effects
in areas of the world where a lot of poor people are living, for
example the way in which climate is already changing in the Sahel
region of Africa—and I think you will be visiting some of
the Sahelian fringe countries in March—similar effects in
southern Africa, the possibility of more variability in the monsoon
in India and the effect of potentially rising sea levels on areas
particularly vulnerable to that, of which Bangladesh would be
a particularly good example. We can see a number of countries
and regions which look vulnerable; within those we certainly expect
that poor people will be particularly vulnerable because of the
circumstances where many of the poor people live. How do we prioritise?
In general the aim of our programme is to put as much of our effort
as possible into those countries where there is a significant
number of poor people—that is how we look at the world—and
particularly those countries where we see the opportunity of sustainable
development and those countries where Britain perhaps has something
particular to offer. If you look at the shape of the British aid
programme, you will see heavy concentration on parts of sub-Saharan
Africa, on South Asia and in a more selective way in other countries,
including countries which have traditional links with the UK.
We will look at vulnerabilities to climate change, particularly
with reference to those countries where there are significant
numbers of poor people, because that is our mission. You asked
whether we look at it on the basis of present risks or future
risks. A crucial factor in the way we look at this is that the
direction of climate change is now fairly clear, but the pace
of climate change is highly uncertain. What we do expect to see
is an intensification of what we already see. For example, everybody
expects that hurricanes and cyclones will over time be on average
of a higher intensity and that has clear implications for areas
like the Caribbean, areas like the Bay of Bengal, where such events
already take place and one may expect them to be more significant.
In terms of rising sea levels there are obvious parts of the world
which are particularly at risk. We should and do take account
of the fact that things we already see manifestations of will
become more serious over a longer term and hence we try to plan
interventions with that in our minds.
Mr Robathan
3. Do your policies concentrate more on the
long-term impacts or on the immediate climatic disasters of which
you have spoken or both? How is it reflected and do you think
the policies adequately address what are after all the less well
understood effects that long-term climatic change will have? It
is easy to deal with a hurricane or a typhoon in the Caribbean,
but it is much less easy to concentrate on the longer-term impacts
and the connection between the increased instance of climatic
disasters and long-term impact.
(Mr Manning) It is difficult to respond directly to
the question of whether we pay more attention to the shorter term
or the longer term. We are running a programme which is gradually
rising. We obviously have a long tradition of trying to respond
to immediate emergencies, for example the major event in Orissa
a couple of years ago. At the same time we have for several years
been looking at the longer term, particularly in terms of disaster
preparedness: there has been a long history of working in the
Caribbean; we have done work over the years in the Philippines
and elsewhere. We are now starting a five-year programme of work
with key partners in Bangladesh, which will involve capacity development
for government officials in the legal, diplomatic and technical
skills needed to negotiate on climate change. It will include
installation in Bangladesh of the regional climate model which
has been developed by the UK's Hadley Centre, which will help
the Bangladesh Government with prediction of impact, with adaptation
and awareness raising. We shall be helping the Bangladesh Government
to identify funding opportunities under the clean development
mechanism which you will be aware of as part of the Kyoto Protocol
and in coordinating the institutional response of government and
civil society organisations to help ensure that climatic change
is seen as a developmental issue with implications for national
planning and policy. I should like to stress the importance we
see of integrating a consideration of climate change into other
national planning processes. There is always an international
tendency to look for a specific set of plans to deal with one
particular thing and the world is awash with sectoral plans of
one sort and another which have not proved very effective. The
direction of our policy is very much to try to integrate these
considerations into the overall national strategy process, so
we are arguing for example for better understanding of environmental
and indeed climate change factors, in the way that reduction strategies
and other documents which set the agenda for governments among
our partners are developed.
Mr Khabra
4. You mentioned sustainable development. Where
sustainability is not possible, what is your attitude to help
those countries and conditions such as the ones you mentioned?
(Mr Manning) What we see in the real world is a great
deal of adaptation by people. People in drought conditions do
not on the whole stay put. Although it has not been very much
publicised, there has been continued deterioration in the rainfall
in the Sahel over the last decade compared with previous decades.
One knows that the Sahel has had a long history of drought. People
have not stayed put under these conditions, there has been a large
amount of migration from the Sahel as people adapt to the year
by year changes in the climate. We see a lot of adaptation going
on and as we look at ways of helping people with their livelihoods
we try to help them cope with that. To give you another example,
we are developing a programme for working with very poor people
on the char lands of Bangladesh, which, as members of the Committee
will know, are these extremely vulnerable and often shifting islands
in the delta, where, given population pressures in Bangladesh,
a lot of people actually live and try to subsist. We are trying
to come up with a medium-term programme to work with some of these
communities, to help them make themselves less vulnerable to events
of all sorts and help them develop their livelihoods. It is not
going to be a case of some blueprint which we are going to drop
on them: it is going to be a question of working with communities
to see what makes sense in circumstances in which they find themselves,
in which a whole series of coping mechanisms are likely to be
necessary.
Mr Robathan
5. Climatic change does bring some opportunities
for change which can be beneficial to developing countries. Does
DFID policy recognise this and assist countries to change crops
or whatever it might be? What are you doing to help developing
countries ameliorate the negative impacts? You mentioned some
things but could you be more specific and in particular could
you just for the record clarify one point? You said that you integrate
climatic change into the whole of the PRSP. The trouble is that
climatic change being a long-term thing people tend to let it
drop off the focus. How do you ensure that it is not marginalised
by policy makers in developing countries?
(Mr Manning) May I first of all invite Andrew Bennett
to give some examples of the kind of work we are doing under our
research programmes to look at the way in which the natural resources
sector, for example, can adapt to increasing stress and then I
will come onto your question about integration.
(Mr Bennett) Poor people have a range of assets which
they can draw on: themselves, communities in which they live,
natural assets of land, physical assets of infrastructure and
their own financial assets. When one looks at their livelihoods
and their vulnerabilities there are things which they are already
doing to cope with extreme and unpleasant events: drought, flood,
salt and other things which are already there and which they are
coping with. The question is whether these traditional systems
which have stood them in such good stead will be able to cope
with more frequent and more rapid or longer duration extreme events.
The things which emerge very quickly in discussions with these
societies is that community cohesion, social capital, is extremely
important. The way in which communities respond and work together
is a very important tool and one needs to build with that grain.
The other extreme events they will have to handle are increasing
flood, increasing drought, problems of salinity building up, higher
temperatures, greater incidence of pests and diseases and a change
in the productivity of coastal zones on which they depend. It
is possible—and we are already doing it—to help communities
adapt their own varieties and farming systems to cope with drought,
with flood, with higher temperatures. In many cases, if you look
at the Sahelian zone, what in fact has happened is that the Sahel
has moved 100 kilometres south. The varieties of crop which were
traditionally grown further north are now moving down. It is possible
to help communities use their own knowledge and understanding
but also to start to augment it through doing research. For example,
techniques of zero tillage, which means that you do not plough
the land, save not only energy but water and it makes it easier
for farmers to do it. This is being done now in vast areas of
the Gangetic plain in India and elsewhere in Central and South
America. Simple techniques of rainwater harvesting allow communities
to trap water. They often need help doing it, not necessarily
because they did not know it needed doing, but in the dry season
many of them had to migrate. In India large numbers of people
migrate to urban areas because it is the only place they can get
work to pay for food. If you can provide them with food and support
in the country they can build up their own water harvesting techniques,
dig their own wells and remain on the land and retain social cohesion
at the same time. Very simple techniques like seed priming—soaking
the seed before you plant it—improves germination can increase
yields at the back end of the year considerably. Salt tolerance—here
we are looking primarily at the mechanisms for salt tolerance.
How is it that some plants can grow in salty areas and not others?
Drought resistance—there is a thing called a grass pea which
is often seen as a famine food in many parts of the world but
it is actually toxic. It contains an alkaloid which makes you
feel very unwell. You can now breed out that toxicity and we have
worked with ICARDA (International Centre of Agricultural Research
in Dry Areas) to do this; this is one of the international research
centres. What I am sketching a picture of is that there are many
things which are already happening. You have to start where the
communities are, you have to keep that social cohesion, you have
to work with the grain, but there are many techniques and technologies
which are now coming in which will allow them to do better because
we hope that the changes will come gradually. Many of them will
choose in the end not to farm; they will seek non-farm and off-farming
work but that is looking at other parts of the economy and the
work going on under the poverty reduction strategies.
(Mr Manning) You asked about how well able we are
to help people integrate longer-term considerations into what
are often seen as quite short-term decisions such as poverty reduction
strategies which are very here and now in the context of debt
reduction and the rest of it. The answer is that it is never going
to be easy to get fully appropriate balance here, but—and
this is a crucial point for the Committee—many of the things
which countries should be doing anyway are likely to be positive
in a world of climate change. For example, basic things like good
governance, free access to the media, better educated population,
are all going to be investments which are going to stand countries
in good stead in the kind of stresses which climate change will
bring on. A lot of the good policies which we would be encouraging
any way are policies which will help resilience to climate change.
It is fair to say that the origin of the policy reduction strategies,
very much in the context of HIPC and the very severe financial
short-term difficulties faced by many developing countries, have
meant that in many developing countries the activity, at least
initially, was seen very much as a kind of Finance Ministry exercise.
We have worked quite hard with the international agencies, with
other donors, with recipient countries, to try to broaden the
dialogue which goes into poverty reduction strategies, particularly
as we move from interim poverty reduction strategies to the full
PRSP. If the Committee agree, I should like to invite Adrian Davis
to say a word or two about the way in which we have worked in
Uganda to try to integrate the environmental dimension, not specifically
the climate change dimension but the environmental dimension,
into the PRSP in that country because it is quite an interesting
example that we would like to see used more widely.
(Mr Davis) The Uganda example is given in our target
strategy paper on page 49, but we were instrumental in ensuring
that the poverty eradication action plan involved the national
environmental management authority. We got them involved in trying
to integrate longer-term environment and sustainability issues.
This would encompass climate change but not necessarily focus
on it specifically. We have been working more generally on this
issue in partnership with others because it does not really make
sense to try to do things by ourselves and the two examples are
particularly specific co-operation with the World Bank. There
is an analysis which shows that environmental sustainability considerations
have improved as we move from an interim to a full PRSP and the
document you had by the World Bank on poverty reduction strategies
and environment illustrate this by means of a numerical scoring
system. You could argue with the method but it shows an improvement.
We have been co-financing with the World Bank a series of workshops
in Africa and Asia and we shall do a series in Latin America too,
bringing together Finance Ministry officials and Environment Ministry
officials to talk around the general issues along with civil society
and the private sector, to talk around the issues of integrating
longer-term considerations into the poverty reduction strategy
process. The whole sort of ethos of the poverty environment partnership,
which is referred to in the memorandum, and on which we have the
first draft of the report which will be submitted to the next
preparatory committee of WSSD and we shall make available to the
Committee, looks at both the micro issues which we have been talking
about and the macro issues of integrating environment into PRSPs
and it is quite powerful set of organisations which all have the
same message. Obviously we are talking from the environmental
side, we are therefore people who are committed to trying to get
environment into PRSPs. We think it is a sufficiently influential
bloc to make sure that the message is understood and received.
It is really raising awareness and showing how the environment
can be integrated and the relative importance of environmental
issues in relation to other actions to reduce poverty. It is clear
that you cannot have sustainable poverty reduction without taking
account of the environment and natural resources constraints more
generally.
Mr Battle
6. May I ask about the internal workings of
DFID and how you handle this agenda? Do you have a unit which
deals with climate change? Are they research specialists? Do they
then feed information across to the programme departments? Do
you rely on the IPCC or the Hadley Centre or advice from experts
in DEFRA? How do you ensure that the advice you are getting feeds
into the programme part of the Department so that it really is
mainstreamed?
(Mr Manning) That is a very important set of questions
and one which we often reflect on internally to try to get it
right. I would say this is not an issue specific to environmental
climate change. You could take almost any subject which might
be of interest to the development and ask yourself how you mainstream
it. To give you another obvious example, take disability, clearly
a major problem in developing countries, what is the right amount
of attention which we should be giving in our programmes to disability?
We have to make a series of judgements. The way in which we seek
to do this is that we have the side of the office which is managed
by our chief advisers—Andrew is here as our Chief Natural
Resources Adviser and we have advisers in education, health, economics
and so on. Under their control are resources for research and
development, some of the research Andrew has talked about, which
helps us to understand the science, to understand the social science
and try to make sense of whatever the subject happens to be. It
is fair to say that DFID is one of the bilateral agencies which
has invested significant amounts broadly speaking in the research
side of our work over many years. There has been a long tradition
going back over decades of paying serious attention to these issues.
Secondly, chief advisers play a very important role internationally
in trying to work with others in the international community to
move opinion forward. You can see that in many areas. You can
see it in malaria research, you can see it in the way the debt
thing was handled and so on. Andrew has important links with his
colleagues in other agencies, the key multilaterals Adrian has
referred to and so on. We try to work very much with our international
partners in this. At country level, as the Committee knows, we
have a series of strategies for our various country programmes.
Choices are made as to what priorities should be that we operate
in those countries. I have brought with me the strategies for
Ghana and Nigeria as I know you are going there shortly and climate
change does not loom very large among them. We are doing work
which is relevant to that. For example, no doubt you will see
the work we are doing on the forestry sector in Ghana which is
an interesting example, but we have to make choices at country
level as to what is most important in the here and now, given
our role is usually as a modest, medium-sized donor to the country
concerned in response to the overall priorities that country has.
We are increasingly trying to build our programmes and priorities
around these poverty reduction strategies based on the experience
of many years that interventions do not work unless they are seriously
owned by the countries concerned. Getting the countries themselves
to give the right kind of weight to these various issues, as it
might be disability or as it might be climate change, is a very
important part of this. We are also looking at a higher level
of aggregation as to the sort of objectives we should be achieving
in our programmes as a whole and our programmes in particular
regions. This is linked very much in our objective setting in
the Department to the international development targets and the
millennium development goals. In both the White Papers we have
published we have made very clear our commitment to reducing poverty
and measuring our progress against these international development
targets which have now been enshrined in the millennium development
goals. Increasingly we are holding our programme managers accountable
for the progress they are making against these quite hard edged
objectives. If you look at our present public service agreement,
you will see that we have quite specific targets, for example
for raising the proportion of children in primary education, decreasing
child mortality by very specific amounts over a period. We are
in the process at the moment of designing a new public service
agreement which we shall need to agree with the Treasury as part
of the spending round which takes place this year and we are looking
at how to ensure that these millennium development goals and these
national development targets are properly rooted in our system
so that we can be accountable against them. These goals include
environmental objectives and as part of this process we shall
need to ensure that we as a department are sufficiently credible
in demonstrating programmes which deliver against the environmental
objectives in the millennium goals and international development
targets as well as to all the others.
7. In the Foreign Office there is a unit as
well dealing with environment which informs programmes where climate
change could be of strategic interest; initiatives in water management
in the central European states for example. Do you have meetings
with them and co-ordinate with them and liaise with them so that
it is seen as an inter-departmental concern?
(Mr Manning) Yes. I personally feel that the Whitehall
linkages in this area are pretty good but I should like to invite
Adrian again to speak to this. I should say that Adrian heads
our Environment Policy Department, which is where these environmental
and sustainable development interests come together. Adrian has
in a way two key jobs. One is the international influence involved,
this work with other agencies to which he has referred. That includes
of course managing important things like our contribution to the
global environment facility which is one of the largest single
contributions we make in this area. Secondly, it is very much
about consciousness raising within the Department and trying to
get more understanding of these issues and greater buy-in across
the Department. I may say that as one attempt to improve the way
we do this my colleague David Warrilow is coming over to address
our senior management committee next month and to give us an update
on current scientific thinking on climate change and the way that
impacts on the programme. I think that will also be a useful intervention
in trying to get a better understanding among senior managers
as to how significant these issues are.
(Mr Davis) There is very close co-operation between
the government departments, tribute to that co-operation is that
the Foreign Office actually changed its name to replicate ours.
They were Energy, Environment and Science and they have now become
Environment Policy Department. Before I reply on the specifics,
may I draw your attention to an omission in the memorandum. We
should have mentioned, and I thought we had, that we have launched
a major study on the impact the climate change may have on the
millennium development goals, how it might affect the millennium
goals. It is a consultancy study. We agreed consultants towards
the end of last year and we are having our first steering committee
meeting next month. When we discussed this within DFID about six
or nine months ago at the genesis of it, we got a lot of interest—unusually
I have to say—from our geographical programmes and from
other sectoral specialists. This kind of long-term strategic thinking
is a relatively new construct, climate change is also a long-term
issue. The combination of the two engendered quite a lot of interest.
The consultants we have engaged are a consortium from Environmental
Resources Management (ERM), but other partners include the Liverpool
School of Tropical Medicine, the Institute of Development Studies
(IDS), the Meteorological Office and Oxford Policy Management.
It is in its early stages. We have agreed terms of reference,
we have agreed the first phase work. It is going to be a relatively
long study over a couple of years and it is going to be broken
into three phases. If the Committee is interested, we shall make
available the terms of reference and our assessment of what we
hope to achieve in the first phase. We will do that.[7]
The other thing to say is that there is not much significant difference
between the set of International Development Targets and the millennium
goals except with respect to environment. We have quoted the Millennium
Development Goal in the memorandum, but it is a significant difference
because it talks about integrating the principles of sustainable
development into country policies and programmes and reversing
the loss of environmental resources. That is different from the
IDT and it is worth saying why it is important, because the IDT
statement of a national strategy for sustainable development in
all countries acted as a barrier to integration. People did not
understand why there should be a separate strategy, what the genesis
of the strategy was. From our point of view the Millennium Development
Goal is very important. Our public service agreement talks about
incorporating the principles of sustainability in ten key partner
countries. It is the public service agreement that we are using
as part of a kind of carrot and stick approach—we do not
really have any sticks in DFID of course; it is mainly carrots.
A key thing is to try to create incentives for people to do things,
not really force them to because it does not work, but, within
the public service agreement we have agreed with country desks
that there will be 11 key countries that we will specifically
concentrate on working with in looking at incorporation of environment,
sustainable development and climate change as part of that nexus
of issues. It is not in the memorandum, but from memory the 11
countries are Kenya, India, China, Russia, Uganda, South Africa,
Zambia, Mozambique, Malawi, Nepal and Ghana; a heavy preponderance
on Africa, which reflects the number of PRSP processes and incorporation
of environmental considerations; the two big emitters and obviously
very influential players on the environmental scene, India and
China and of course Russia. It gives us an ability to discuss
and take forward some of these issues with country programmes
who profess themselves willing to do this and that is of course
very important.
Mr Colman
8. I am assuming there is a twelfth country,
which of course is the UK. I see you list them in your annex as
one of the five countries which you are working on. In showing
the weakness within the millennium goals, in terms of dealing
with issues of climate change and sustainable development and
the need to unpack that and to get more specificity there, do
you think that one of the goals which should be at the Rio+10
summit on sustainable development in Johannesburg this year should
be to split out and have more detail in terms of the millennium
goals rather than the rather weak goal which is there at the moment?
(Mr Davis) There is this famous road map behind the
millennium development goals which talks about specific actions.
You cannot really quantify this Millennium Development Goal, which
may be both an advantage and a disadvantage and any environmental
issues need to be looked at on a country specific basis. There
is no real substitute for taking the millennium goal as a call
for action and using that to influence and persuade people that
these issues are important and of course to unpack the issues
relevant and relative to what the country circumstances are. There
will be further discussions within the UN system. I am not sure
WSSD will do that unpacking because it needs to be done in a country
context and ideally in the context of the PRSP kind of negotiations.
Mr Colman: Might I suggest that every
single millennium goal needs to be done on a country basis and
there is a need to get measurability but clearly evidence we have
had so far is that there is measurability there. I shall leave
with you the thought that we have 6 months to go and one of the
things which could be there is that the world has within the millennium
goals some sort of measurability on climate change and sustainable
development.
Mr Worthington
9. I understand when you were asked how much
you had committed to climate change you found it a difficult question
and called in consultants and they identified perhaps £200
million which could be devoted. It is a perverse question in a
way but do you not think it was right that you should have found
it difficult?
(Mr Manning) Yes, I do and I have looked at this consultancy
study and I am not sure that this is quite the right approach.
I say that because I do think that many of the interventions we
are seeking to make are interventions which are going to strengthen
resilience to climate change and I slightly resist the idea of
drawing a line round something and saying this is relevant to
climate change and that is not. To my mind educating girls is
relevant to climate change. These things are all going to help
developing countries become more resilient to the kind of pressures
on them. I strongly believe in the work Amartya Sen did on famines
and Amartya Sen famously said that famines are not caused by shortages
of food but are caused by lack of democracy. That is right. We
have seen in many countries that when there is information, when
people actually think about the environment, when there is an
opportunity to challenge governments, when you change systems,
this is extremely important to how issues are dealt with. I rather
resist the idea that we should have a package of things with a
boundary round it called interventions to do with climate change.
That is not to say we should not be doing things which are important,
for example working with the G7 on the pilot project for conservation
of Brazilian rain forests, something which is highly relevant
to mitigating climate change. We are funding a programme in China
with the World Bank which is going to be quite substantial and
will essentially improve energy efficiency in China which is one
of the key interventions. You will see in the memorandum that
one of the most striking developments over the last 15 years is
that the energy efficiency of the Chinese economy has radically
improved. We are doing things which are directly relevant to this
but I personally feel the most important thing we can do is to
promote pro-poor development, particularly as poor people are
the people who are going to be most vulnerable to all this. If
we can make fewer people poor, there will be less vulnerability
to climate change.
10. So any recommendation which came out of
this Committee to establish offices or departments for climate
change would be counter-productive.
(Mr Manning) We certainly need capacity essentially
to understand the climate change agenda, to inform ourselves about
the climate change agenda and to invest sufficiently in the underpinning
research to understand what is going on. We do not need to be
experts in all this ourselves, but we need to have access to the
expertise which David and others have and we need to use that
to shape the programmes and to encourage the way people think.
I would not myself counsel the Committee to recommend a certain
proportion of the aid programme to deal with climate change, any
more than I would encourage you to do that for disability or AIDS
or any other subject.
11. I was struck by what Adrian said about the
way you got organised before. You had environment in a box and
the fact that it was in a box was preventing environment having
an impact. You said something like that.
(Mr Davis) I would argue that the climate change expertise
in the way Richard has mentioned does reside in the Environment
Policy Department. What happened was that we were much more focused
three years ago on the international negotiations, not just for
climate change but for biodiversity, etcetera and we had rather
assumed that environmental issues were adequately integrated into
DFID programmes. We had an evaluation report which suggested that
was not necessarily the case, so we tried to change our efforts
to look at how we could be seen to be more credible by trying
to mainstream these environmental issues within DFID. It has not
been in a box. We lead on general environmental issues, but we
can only do so in co-operation with country programmes. One of
the most important issues is to raise the level of environmental
awareness among DFID staff as well.
12. I can see the desirability of mainlining
environmental issues, but do you not sometimes have to do the
opposite thing which is to say that this is not for us, this is
going beyond what DFID can do. This is for multilateral activity,
it is for European activity, it is for the World Bank, for other
people to be tackling because this is expanding development on
a country basis beyond what it can cope with and we need other
people in there.
(Mr Manning) That is certainly true and a key observation
of the first White Paper in 1997 was that there were very severe
limits to what Britain could do on their own, but there was a
great deal we could do in working with our international partners.
This is a classic case where that is true; it is particularly
true of the science. The IPCC has been a very important investment
of the global community in a general understanding of the science
and a common understanding of the science. It would make no sense
to do that on an individual country basis. Equally we certainly
do not believe and our Secretary of State does not believe that
we should be doing everything in every country where we are operating.
We have to be selective as a matter of management and common sense.
What we need to help our partners to ensure is that the right
kind of attention is given to the longer-term issues when very
naturally a lot of our partners are focusing very much on the
next six months.
13. It does seem to me that it is a very, very
important issue, if there is a problem about desertification or
water management and so on, to get the right international response
rather than the right British response. How do you feel about
that?
(Mr Manning) In some areas there is a very strong
underpinning for it. The international research institutes for
agriculture, of which Andrew is the greatest living expert, are
a very important part of this in that particular area. I do not
know whether David has any observations about the way in which
it works on the international scientific side, but my impression
is that that is quite constructive.
(Mr Warrilow) I could say a little bit about the IPCC
process where internationally scientists are brought together
to assess what research has been done. It is important to bear
in mind that IPCC does what is already there and it builds upon
the work which is funded by different countries individually.
We fund quite a lot of research in this country and a lot of that
research finds its way into the IPCC process. An important point
to make is that the IPCC tries not to get involved in the politics
of climate change so that it does not deal with specific countries
but deals with the regional and general aspects of climate change.
Specific examples can be found in the reports but at the summary
level it draws on the general approach. At the end of the day
it does not put any new research into the system other than assimilating
and reviewing what is already there. To develop the science it
has to be done at country level or regional grouping level.
(Mr Manning) Another very important part of the multilateral
establishment has been both the Montreal protocol work and now
of course the global environment facility and Adrian is leading
on the replenishment negotiations for that. The thing for the
Committee to keep an eye on over the next few months is how those
negotiations finish up. We certainly believe strongly in a multinational
approach wherever possible. That is one of the reasons why we
built this alliance with the UNDP, World Bank and European Community,
together an important player, in an attempt to get the whole international
system thinking the same way.
14. Another question I have is about environmental
issues and particularly climate change being given sufficient
weight in country strategy papers. Could I take it that the ten
countries you have mentioned which are becoming involved are ones
where environmental issues are specifically highlighted in country
strategy papers? Or is this a general issue?
(Mr Davis) There are both country strategy papers
and annual programme performance reviews. Increasingly I would
expect the fact that these countries are focus countries for the
PSA would lead to a requirement to start reporting in the APPRs
each year against the PSA targets. So yes, there will be a linkage
within those papers.
(Mr Manning) I should perhaps explain the system for
you. We write country strategies on a three- or four-year basis.
I was glancing at the Ghana one, which is really quite out of
date now as it is a 1998 document but there is presumably about
to be a new one. We now have a system where for all significant
programmes there is an annual programme performance review which,
unlike these, are not published documents but they are important
internal management documents in which among other things we assess
how each country programme is performing against the objectives
which have been set in the CSP. We adjust those objectives when
it seems sensible to do so ahead of the next main country strategy
and we do look at how that country is performing against the various
targets in the PSA including the environmental one. This is a
process which has started over the last 12 months. We shall see
a greater focus in those 11 countries in the direction we are
talking about.
15. So in the second wave country strategy papers
the environment is bursting through, is it?
(Mr Davis) I have not seen many country strategy papers
recently. I am not sure what the cycle is. We may be in a kind
of fallow period for the production of the major country strategy
papers. I would expect it to be highlighted in the 11 focus countries
at least. May I just add one other thing we are thinking of doing?
Because the poverty environment paper joint production has been
well received, the European Commission suggested that we might
like to try to replicate that for climate change and we are actively
pursuing that as an idea. We have not had comments yet from the
World Bank/UNDP but it seems to us a sensible thing to try to
do.
Chairman
16. May I ask a rather boring machinery of government
question? This year we have Rio+10 at Johannesburg. Who in the
machinery of government is responsible for working out policy
on that, working up objectives? Who leads? Which member of the
Cabinet leads? Am I right in thinking that so far the only heads
of government to have committed themselves to attending Johannesburg
are our Prime Minister, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg and the
President of Venezuela? Does DFID have policy objectives for Johannesburg
and what are they and how do they relate to what we are discussing
this morning?
(Mr Manning) Government is indeed developing and has
developed a core script for Johannesburg. There is an inter-departmental
process which is led at official level by DEFRA. To my mind it
works pretty well. There is also a ministerial process which involves
the Deputy Prime Minister, the Secretary of State for the Department
for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Foreign Secretary,
our own Secretary of State and other departments in the usual
way and which has now had a couple of meetings and will go on
meeting regularly in the run-up to Johannesburg. Adrian, do you
have an update on which heads of government are coming?
(Mr Davis) The Foreign Office have done a lobbying
exercise. There is some doubt but I think Putin has also said
he will attend. Most people are saying it is too early in the
replies we get to telegrams etcetera, but they are confident their
Head of State will attend. Those are the only ones who have formally
accepted.
(Mr Manning) My impression is that there will be quite
a lot of heads of state and governments there, but it is a bit
early in the cycle to be sure. What is certain is that the British
Government are taking this event seriously. We see it as quite
linked to the Financing for Development event which is taking
place in Monterrey in March; the same issues will come up in both.
Some of these issues will be revisited at the Kananaskis summit
which falls between the two and the various departments concerned
with all these events are very much in touch with each other and
trying to adopt a consistent policy through the whole cycle of
events this year.
Mr Colman
17. Taking us back to the big picture, what
do you see as your prime approach as DFID for dealing with the
effect of climatic disasters and long-term climate change? Is
it adaptation, mitigation or population displacement? Which of
the three is really your mainstream forward?
(Mr Manning) It is a very important question. I was
reflecting as I was thinking about this on the way we deal with
AIDS, where again the issue is how much is trying to operate on
the prevention side and how much is dealing with the consequences.
What we do not do in either case is say we are going to spend
this much on AIDS and decide ex ante that we are going
to spend this much on prevention or research for a vaccine and
this much on curative measures. We try instead to optimise mainly
at country level what interventions are most useful. Obviously
mitigation is very important. I have referred already to the significance
of what has been happening in China. To my mind the most important
single mitigation factor is the appropriate pricing of energy.
The Chinese example shows that very clearly. What has happened
in Eastern Europe shows it pretty clearly as well. We need to
reduce the energy intensity of production and this is a very wide
agenda. It involves lots of new investment, it involves new technology,
it involves in particular giving consumers, including notably
industrial consumers, the right kind of price signals so that
they take sensible investment decisions over the medium term.
I have given an example where we are working on that with the
World Bank in China. There is quite an agenda of both energy efficiency
type measures but also—and this is not captured in the statistics—as
you work through poverty reduction strategies, as countries increasingly
realise that they cannot afford environmentally unsound subsidies,
of which there are many in developing countries, then the energy
intensity of production will gradually fall. As long as people
are getting energy at very low rates or are being inappropriately
subsidised you are not going to see much progress. That is probably
the biggest single area, although it is by no means the only one.
There is a huge agenda in forestry for example and so on. On adaptation,
it is quite clear that adaptation not only needs to take place,
but is taking place. People do adapt. I was just being told as
I came into the room of a very interesting example in Bangladesh
where the loss of life in comparable sized cyclones has fallen
very dramatically. Over 300,000 were killed in the events in 1971;
something like 100,000 were killed in the event in 1991 and round
about 100 killed or something like that in a very comparable event
in 1998 and that is because there has been an investment in cyclone
shelters, there has been an investment in prevention, people have
learned to their cost that they need to heed the warnings. There
are better communications and you cannot entirely make it like
with like, but it is clear that Bangladesh, because of sensible
investment, has made itself somewhat less vulnerable to some of
these events than would have been the case even ten years ago.
There is a lot more that can be done in this way. For example,
we are funding a study to look at the likely impact of climate
change on our own overseas territories. This will help the overseas
territories consider what they themselves can do in our support
to make themselves less vulnerable to climate change. We see that
as a sensible investment for many countries. As I have said already,
a key part of adaptation is building on things people should be
doing anyway and on a lot of the things that need to happen. If
you adopt the kind of livelihoods approach that we tend to adopt
when we look at area based development, if we are dealing let
us say with the rain fed areas of India, where we have quite some
experience now, the rain fed areas of India are a classic case
where they will become more vulnerable to climate change because
rainfall patterns will become more erratic, maybe droughts will
be longer, some of these issues about the kind of crops you grow,
some of these issues about how far you depend on agriculture and
how far you develop other means of livelihood strategies become
very significant. As we develop programmes, for example in the
tribal areas of Orissa, we have to look at what the main risks
to people are, including the risks arising from climate change.
So there will be a series of interventions which you will see
around the globe which will reflect the way in which the variability
we can see already in the natural environment—and our perception
of that variability is going to grow—should be informing
the way projects are designed.
18. In a sense you have answered the rest of
my question in terms of looking at project and programme evaluations
within DFID. May I ask a tangential one? I was interested in your
first reply which was mitigation and dealing with energy policy.
To what extent are you involved with the OECD convention on export
credit agencies and environmental considerations where there is
an attempt by the United States to ensure that renewable technology
exports get priority over fossil fuel energy technologies, something
the UK Government has as yet not backed in terms of signing that
convention? Do you get involved when there are in fact export
credit approvals for fossil fuel energy technology exports to
developing countries? Do you get consulted on that? Do you take
an active interest in that?
(Mr Manning) It is down to the Export Credits Guarantee
Department and their sponsor ministry which is the Department
of Trade and Industry to take decisions on export credit cases,
as you will know from looking at dams in Turkey for example. We
have advised ECGD on approaches they might adopt to looking at
environmental consequences of export credit but it is for them
to take these decisions and to look for advice where they can
find it. If they come to us we will help to put them in touch
with useful sources of expertise but it is their decision to do
that. We certainly strongly support, as indeed do they, the idea
of getting better environmental understanding into the export
credit business, but I am not aware of the specific distinctions
being made here between renewables and fossil fuel exports. I
am not aware that there is a proposition which would in any way
ban export credits for fossil fuel projects.
19. Not ban but would certainly give less priority
to them and less help. Could we have a note in terms of what DFID
and DEFRA are doing in looking at this area on a cross-government
basis, dealing with the need to move to less CO2 emitting energy
technology with developing countries?[8]
(Mr Manning) You will be aware that there
was an exercise in the run-up to the Naples summit looking at
renewable energy and there is ongoing work in Whitehall internationally
on how to promote sustainable renewable energy. The economics
of renewable energy continue to improve and they are expected
to improve further over time. There remains an interesting question
as to the case for a degree of public subsidy to enhance the take-up
of such technology.
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