Memorandum submitted by Saleemul Huq,
Head, Climate Change Group, International Institute for Environment
and Development
ADAPTATION AND
TECHNOLOGY
5.1 Is there adequate support for developing
countries to adapt to climate change?
The current funding available to support adaptation
in the developing countries under the UNFCCC (ie the Least Developed
Countries Fund and the Special Climate Change Fund) and the Kyoto
Protocol (ie the Adaptation fund) currently have several million
Pounds available which are utterly inadequate compared to the
estimated demand (which is likely to be many tens of Billions
of pounds a year) as estimated by the World Bank and UNFCCC).
It will therefore, be necessary to agree on new and innovative
funding mechanisms which are able to (i) generate the magnitudes
of funding required and (ii) do so on regular year-on-year basis.
The Adaptation Fund under the Kyoto Protocol
is a new and innovative funding mechanism based as it is on an
"Adaptation Levy", ie 2% of certified emission reductions
(CERs) approved under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM). This
does not involve national development assistance funds but is
a global tax (or levy) on an international transaction. It is
estimated that this "adaptation levy" on CDM transactions
will generate several hundred million Pounds by 2012.
There are already proposals by a number of countries
(including the least developed countries group) that the "adaptation
levy" be applied to the other flexible mechanisms under the
Kyoto Protocol, such as the Joint Implementation (JI) as well
as the European Trading Scheme (ETS). If this were to be agreed
then the amount of funds generated for the Adaptation Fund would
increase by an order of magnitude to over a billion pounds a year.
The latter could be done by retaining a percentage of the funds
generated from auctioning emission rights in the next phase of
the ETS.
There are also some proposals to extend the
"adaptation levy" beyond the flexible mechanisms to
polluting activities, such as international air travel. Thus,
for example, if the 2% adaptation levy were to be applied to international
air passenger tickets it would generate in the order of 10 billion
pounds a year in additional fund flows.
These are some of the avenues that will need
to be explored in order to generate the amounts of funding that
will be required by the developing countries to meet the costs
of adaptation to climate change.
5.2 Should there be binding targets for funding
and how could these be decided?
It is possible for Annex I countries to also
agree on binding targets for funding. These could be either agreed
on a voluntary basis by each Annex I country, or (admittedly more
difficult to achieve) on an agreed proportion based on levels
of emissions of each country.
The most important point to agree on ways of
generating the amounts needed on a regular basis, whether by innovative
funding mechanisms or by binding targets by Annex I countries.
5.3 How will funding for climate change mitigation
or adaptation interact with existing aid budgets?
The Annex I countries under the UNFCCC are committed
to finding new funding mechanisms to pay the developing countries
for the costs of both mitigation as well as adaptation. However,
that does not mean that there is not a role for Official Development
Assistance (ODA) to support certain climate change related activities
(including both mitigation as well as adaptation).
The first thing that development funding agencies,
both bilateral as well as multilateral, need to do is to examine
their own investment portfolios in the developing countries and
screen them for climate sensitivity as well opportunities for
mitigation actions. For the projects that exhibit such opportunities
for both "climate proofing" (or adaptation) as well
as being more "climate friendly" (ie mitigation) they
can be funded from the regular budgets of those projects (the
costs are unlikely to be increased by more than a few percent
in most cases).
However, for the bulk of the technology transfer
needed (primarily for mitigation) and "climate proofing"
(for adaptation) under the auspices of the UNFCCC, new and non
-ODA funding will need to be found.
5.4 Will such funding contribute to wider
sustainable development goals?
The utilisation of such funding (both for mitigation
as well as adaptation) will need to be linked very closely with
sound sustainable development policies and practices in the developing
countries. Here, we are beginning to find ways of ensuring that
both mitigation as well as adaptation is carried out in ways that
are compatible with sustainable development. This will not be
too difficult a challenge to meet.
6.1 Is there effective international coordination
on technology R&D?
Technology R&D on mitigation has been going
on for a number of years and there are already a number of efforts
to ensure effective international coordination.
On adaptation, however, it is still early days
with respect to technology R&D and there are still no effective
efforts to coordinate at the international level. One feature
to bear in mind with regard to adaptation technology R&D is
that it is less to do with hard technology (as in mitigation)
and more to do with soft technology which incudes knowledge, practice
and experience, etc. It is also less likely to follow the path
of technology R&D and dissemination for mitigation where the
technology is developed in the richer countries of the North and
disseminated or transferred to the poorer countries of the South.
Adaptation is so site specific in its nature that there is more
value on South-South transfer of knowledge and technology than
North-South.
There are, as yet, very few such South-South
knowledge and technology dissemination efforts.
6.2 How might technology transfer to developing
countries be improved?
In the case of adaptation technology (more broadly
defined to include knowledge and practice as well as hard technology)
the case is for promoting South-to-South exchange of knowledge
and information, rather than only North-to-South. Indeed, given
the fact the least developed countries have been the first to
carry out national adaptation plans of action (NAPAs) there may
even be a case of transfer of know-how and technology from the
poorer countries of the South to the richer countries of the North.
February 2008
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