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.
4 National Adaptation Plans of Action Back
| 
