Sustainable Development in a Changing Climate - International Development Committee Contents


Examination of Witness (Questions 36-39)

MR ALEX COBHAM, MS SARA SHAW AND MR TIM JONES

27 JANUARY 2009

  Q36 Chairman: Thank you all three for coming in from your respective organisations. Again, for the record, could you just introduce yourselves for the shorthand writer?

  Mr Jones: I am Tim Jones, Campaigns Policy Officer from the World Development Movement.

  Ms Shaw: I am Sara Shaw; I am a Climate Change Policy Officer at Tearfund.

  Mr Cobham: Alex Cobham and I manage the policy team at Christian Aid.

  Chairman: Thank you all very much. I hope this will be a useful exchange. You appreciate that what the Committee is looking for is practical recommendations in a sense because there is sometimes a danger in this area that it gets very philosophical about approaches. What inputs and outputs we can get is what is of interest to us. I will ask Andrew Stunell to lead off.

  Q37  Andrew Stunell: Perhaps you could set the scene for us by telling us how effective you think DFID is in integrating climate change adaptation with disaster risk management and with environmental management?

  Ms Shaw: I will make a start. On the positive side we do welcome that DFID is putting greater emphasis on climate change and on disaster risk reduction. I know they launched their strategy on disaster risk reduction with which Tearfund were quite involved a few years ago. I think there has been an effort to develop some climate and disaster related activities and research at the country programme level and at an international policy level as well. The climate change adaptation in Africa research is an example of that. I think the ORCHID Programme, which is piloting integrating climate risk into disaster risk reduction, which was piloted in India and Bangladesh, and examples of that, a different version of that was also piloted in Kenya. I think those are helpful examples. In terms of a much broader approach to climate screening and full integration across programmes, I do not think that has been as full yet as perhaps it could be. I do not know if my colleagues have anything to add.

  Mr Cobham: I do agree with that. In the last couple of years DFID has really taken greater strides in bringing up the profile on its adaptation work and has put a lot of effort into that but there remains this issue of it is almost running separately from its other work, as Simon Anderson mentioned earlier, its economic development work, and that is a real problem.

  Mr Jones: I am not an expert on adaptation issues. There are comments that I would want to make about DFID's approach to mitigation and its role more broadly within the government of being a voice for those living in poverty around the world, which I would be happy to contribute now. In our evidence that we gave we highlighted the particular example of the Phulbari coalmine in Bangladesh, which is an open-cast mine that a British company would like to develop and which would displace, they claim, around 40,000 to 50,000—an expert group from the Bangladesh Government predicted more like 120,000—people from their land. In answer to a parliamentary question last year Gareth Thomas, Minister for Business and for International Development said that the British High Commissioner had been lobbying on behalf of the British company for this mine to go ahead. It is not apparent in this case either whether DFID had any say in this position of actively supporting this project or whether it has just been voices within the Department for Business, but there has certainly been lots of confusion around who is taking responsibility for this. So we have had emails going to the Department for Business who said this is a DFID matter and then we sent them to DFID. DFID said that this is a Department for Business matter. Fundamentally the British High Commissioner has been lobbying on behalf of this mine purely, we would say, in terms of profit for the UK company and economic development with no consideration of sustainable development and actually what it will mean for people on the ground.

  Q38  Andrew Stunell: I have a feeling that one of my colleagues might want to come back to you on that. Can I come back to what changes you think need to be made? You have emphasised some of the positive aspects but you also made it clear that you have some reservations. How do you think that the traditional development programmes that DFID supports need to be changed to take further account, better account of climate change?

  Ms Shaw: I think there needs to be much broader screening and climate proofing of all of DFID's portfolio's development work. You can develop a great project and build something in an area which is incredibly vulnerable to climatic changes, if it is in a flood plain or is at risk of sea level rise, and clearly that is unhelpful. So sometimes we have siloed it and only looked at some of the implications in some areas, whereas I think it needs to be a much broader process across all of DFID's programmatic work, looking at how you screen and how you proof that. DFID does need to take a sustainable resource management approach, so not looking at resources as prospects for exploitation but as something to be sustained and managed; and I think there should be increased community engagement. You develop better and more environmentally robust approaches when you have full community engagement on the projects' work. On the issue of financing, the fact that DFID has particularly directed financing through the World Bank rather than supporting some of the other funds which are around, for example the fund which gives money to NAPAs[4] or the Adaptation Fund is not particularly helpful either.

  Mr Cobham: I think there is a real problem that the vast bulk of, explicitly, the adaptation financing from DFID is going through the World Bank, for a number of reasons, in part because as we know the World Bank is not an organisation that has a good reputation for local ownership in its work. Its strength is in delivering large-scale projects of a certain sort. What it has not done is involve local communities in those projects and often the projects have been at great cost to those local communities. If we are looking for locally owned adaptation, which we must be if we are serious, it does not seem like the way to go. In addition, the oversight of the World Bank's adaptation finance is not at all strong, so the ability of DFID to hold the World Bank to account for actually delivering on its adaptation goals is far from clear. If I can mention one case. In August 2007 19 of the biggest development and environmental NGOs wrote to DFID requesting that they engage in discussions about the proposal that those NGOs—and it is quite something to have the line-up of NGOs that signed up to that—wanted to work together to work on pilots of adaptation finance that would involved effectively community-based adaptation; so putting a positive alternative to funding all this money through the World Bank. That proposal was not taken forward and the commitment of DFID to financing through the World Bank has remained and arguably strengthened. I think there is a need for DFID to look again at alternatives to the way that they do their adaptation financing.

  Q39  Andrew Stunell: So what would be the difference between a project which went through your 19 NGO community groups and one that came through the World Bank?

  Mr Cobham: For example, the tendency of the World Bank has been to finance, as I have said, large scale projects, whether that would be a hydro-dam or a large coal powered station perhaps ready for carbon capture and storage, but we know that the energy efficiency of that type of project is very low. Even Kingsnorth, being discussed here, at best would have an efficiency of 49 % but on average you are looking at more like 35 %. The alternative is local energy so that you do not lose the energy and the heat particularly through distribution; you have smaller power stations operating within communities. But that is not the kind of project that the World Bank is really set up to enable or to support. So it is that kind of thing and working with communities to see what their needs are for energy but also the broader issues like adaptation. It is that type of thing that the World Bank just is not geared up to deliver. Again, as Simon Anderson was saying earlier, involving local civil society is really key to making those projects work for the communities in which they are based.


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