Examination of Witnesses (Questions 257-259)
DR CAMILLA
TOULMIN AND
DR SALEEMUL
HUQ
11 JULY 2006
Q257 Chairman: Thank you both very much
for coming and agreeing to give evidence. As you will appreciate,
there are a number of aspects of the response to natural disasters
and their causes. We are very glad to have your views on a number
of points. We will come to climate change in which I know both
of you, but particularly Dr Huq, have an interest. But environmental
degradation is not caused only by climate change. There is a tendency
for that to be so fashionable and many of us think that it is
such a serious concern that we forget we are constantly doing
things to the environment which have negative consequences. It
may be worth starting with the question of the extent to which
development players take sufficient account of how to deal with
the potential for natural disasters in their development programmes;
in other words, to make specific investments in either avoiding
them or acknowledging the threat that they pose and building them
in. Do you believe that they do so; if so, can you give some examples
of where they do the right things, or seriously the wrong things?
Dr Toulmin: Let me first introduce
Saleemul Huq who runs our climate change group. I am very pleased
that he is available to come with me today, because particularly
in relation to climate-related matters he is the man to ask. We
see the growing importance of climate change as being, if you
like, a very useful way to remind people of a whole range of other
risks in respect of which many communities in poor countries have
been vulnerable for many decades. If you like, climate change
gives us the opportunity to flag up the persistence of those risks
and their heightened impact with the sorts of changes that are
under way at the moment. Our experience is as much of what national
governments are doing as with development projects per se;
that is to say, a lot of our work involves work with local partners
on national policy, legislation and approaches to development.
We would probably be at least if not more comfortable talking
about that than specific DFID or other donor approaches.
Q258 Chairman: I think we are looking
for specific examples. It does not matter who did them.
Dr Toulmin: I have given to the
Committee's staff a copy of a paper on Africa and climate change
that we put out last year[5].
That reviews a number of the factors that make good development
sense in a variety of different sectors, including the importance
of working through and strengthening local institutions as being
one of the best means of tackling risks of all sorts, whether
it be in relation to flooding, harvest failure or a number of
different things. We are trying to tease out what might be some
of the generic lessons of addressing climate change for broader
good development. Therefore, we are considering the importance
of local institutions in seeing how one can work to strengthen
them. I believe that on the previous occasion we were here we
talked in particular about whether or not the push towards direct
budgetary support would weaken in many ways the strengths of the
local structures that provide day-to-day contact and means by
which many communities meet their needs and address risks of various
sorts.
Q259 Chairman: Would an example be something
like deforestation where in partnership with the host government
an organisation would say, "We will give you support to stop
the deforestation and do other things as part a development process
that prevents further degradation and perhaps even restores some
of the watercourses"? Is that the kind of thing that one
is talking about and, if so, does it happen?
Dr Toulmin: To some extent it
does. I suppose we would say that we must look at this from various
different standpoints. There might well be good ways in which
one can use markets for ecosystem services as a way to try to
address questions of deforestation by linking people downstream
of a particular forest who suffer from sedimentation and poor
water quality with those up at the top of the watershed who are
responsible for much of the deforestation but do not as yet have
an incentive to change their land use practices. Quite a lot of
work in which our group has been involved in a number of countries
with DFID support has been to look at whether one can have good
arrangements set up between downstream and upstream users precisely
to address the problem of externalities associated with a particular
form of land use. Perhaps the other really important factor is
the clarification and confirmation of rights over land, water
and forest resources so that there is a much closer association
between rights and responsibilities and people can make long-term
decisions about how they will use that land and those forests
rather than others coming in, making a quick buck and rapidly
retreating, leaving devastation behind them.
5 Africa and climate change, Sustainable Development
Opinion 2005, IIED. Back
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