2The urgency and scale of the challenge
14.Answering the first question of the first evidence session of the Committee’s inquiry, Clare Shakya, from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), began the proceedings with a sobering reminder: “if you were being offered to get on a plane with a 66% chance of survival, would you get on? This is what we are doing with our planet right now. It is existential”.15 This analogy set the tone for the evidence that was to follow. The Committee heard, over and over again, that the crisis the world is facing is huge–in scale, in intensity, in urgency.
15.As the International Development Committee, we asked: what will be the consequences if the international development community fails to rise to the challenge of climate change? The answers we received depicted a nightmarish future:
- Oxfam GB:
If the international community fails to take adequate action to support the 3.5 billion poorest people around the world who face increased risk of floods, droughts, hunger and disease, millions of lives and livelihoods will be lost.16
- Marie Stopes International:
If the international development community fails to take action, there is a real risk that progress in international development over the past decades will begin to regress, particularly in terms of livelihoods and poverty, human security, and human health.17
- Tearfund:
A temperature increase of more than 1.5 °C above pre-industrial temperatures will impact the poorest worst, causing increased food and water insecurity, conflict, displacement and disease.18
- WWF–UK:
Climate change is already impacting people around the world, exacerbating poverty and undermining development efforts. Climate change undermines all of the SDGs, and if we fail to act on climate change, any prospect of ending poverty will be far out of reach.19
- Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment:
Many of the impacts of climate change will be felt through changes in environmental factors, whether through inundation of previously inhabitable or productive areas due to sea level rise, more frequent and/or intense extreme weather events (e.g. rainfall, tropical cyclones, heatwaves, etc.), or a lack of water (causing extended droughts and desertification). These changes will affect all other developmental priorities, including potential destruction or damage of economic infrastructure (roads, water networks, communication networks and buildings), damage to social infrastructure (hospitals, schools), exposure of populations to new health hazards (disease), or risks to economic output (heat impacts causing a decrease in labour productivity, crop destruction or loss of capital investment).20
- Bond Development and Environment Group (DEG):
Humanitarian disasters are the price of inaction. Communities across the globe are being hit by more frequent and more extreme weather-related disasters as a result of climate change.21
- Christian Aid:
Undoubtedly, unless there is strong and concerted international efforts to rapidly and profoundly address the causes of climate change, the vast majority of the progress on eradicating poverty achieved in recent decades will be reversed. Climate impacts will progressively overwhelm people’s and Governments’ ability to cope, and render achievement of the SDGs impossible.22
- The written submission from the UK Government also highlighted:
The 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review concluded that the impacts of climate change will exacerbate instability, conflict and migration in many countries–with an increased severity and magnitude of natural disasters destabilising economies, supply chains and our trading partners of the future.23
16.The answers we heard were often grounded in the conclusions of the latest studies and reports from economists, scientists, and international institutions on the current and expected impacts of climate change. Some responses to the Committee focused on how particular development goals would be affected:
Health
17.Professor Sir Andrew Haines of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, highlighted that climate change will affect “the transmission of important vector-borne and water-borne diseases including malaria, dengue and diarrhoeal diseases as well as adversely affecting food safety through likely increases in food poisoning and mycotoxin (e.g. aflatoxin) exposure”.24 He stressed that “increasing temperatures will result in growing exposure to extreme heat thus increasing death rates”, citing recent supporting studies. He pointed to the World Health Organisation’s projection that there will be about 250,000 additional deaths annually from climate change between 2030 and 2050,25 and suggested that this “is likely to be an underestimate because it only considers a limited number of health outcomes (diarrhoea, undernutrition, heat stress, malaria)”.26
Food security and nutrition
18.Christian Aid warned how without action to prevent global warming, climate change will affect nutrition:
warming at 2ºC as compared to 1.5ºC will reduce wheat crops by 7 percentage points, and maize by 3 percentage points in tropical regions, affecting access to affordable food, and increased carbon/nitrogen ratios in plants will reduce nutritional quality. Ocean acidification and corresponding loss of fisheries productivity likewise presents serious nutritional risks.27
Oxfam GB similarly outlined how failure to tackle climate change will impact on “all aspects of food security”:
availability, access, utilisation, and stability. It threatens the production and distribution of food. It threatens people’s ability to access food by undermining livelihoods and destabilising prices, and it damages diets by harming human health and putting at risk the quality of food produced.28
Results UK gave the example of Ethiopia as one country that is particularly vulnerable to these impacts, where “85% of the population is employed in agriculture, mostly on small scale, family farms. Climate change and associated droughts, delayed rains, and flooding weigh on agricultural productivity and food security”.29
Water
19.Some written submissions outlined how the availability and safety of water would be affected. WaterAid highlighted that:
climate change impacts are largely felt through water–either too much, or too little–and we need to urgently invest in water infrastructure to strengthen communities from the impacts of droughts, floods, and the waterborne diseases, such as cholera, which result from these impacts.30
Christian Aid similarly stated that the impacts of climate change are likely to “cause greater water scarcity through drought, and greater contamination of water through flooding.”31
Gender equality
20.According to ActionAid, climate change has a disproportionate impact on women in developing countries and increases gender inequality. They told us that as environmental stresses increase, causing food security and hunger to rise, the amount of unpaid care work, for which women are disproportionately responsible, also increases. Additionally, there is an increased risk of violence to women due to having to walk longer distances and spend time in unsafe areas in order to collect water and firewood. Disrupted livelihoods and increased domestic labour means reduced access to education and income opportunities.32 Christian Aid similarly asserted that girls would likely be affected by the impacts of climate change “significantly more than boys”.33 The submission from the consultancy, Mott MacDonald, stated that climate change has a disproportionate impact on women, as well as people with disabilities.34
21.Overall, there was broad agreement across the evidence base that it will be the least developed countries and the most vulnerable people who will be hit the first and the hardest.35 However, as implied by the Government’s written submission and the 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review, due to the global nature of our economy, the indirect impacts on the UK will be significant. And ultimately, as Nick Mabey, Chief Executive of E3G points out, the UK will “suffer directly” as well.36
The need for a suitable strategy
22.How then, should the UK be using its aid budget to give the international community the best possible chance of preventing these devastating outcomes? The implications of the latest climate science and the evidence the Committee has received suggest to us that there are several important and necessary approaches:
- Firstly, we heard that the UK must act with urgency when spending aid for combating climate change. As Nick Mabey pointed out, climate aid is different from traditional aid because “it has to deliver a certain outcome in a certain period of time, or it doesn’t work”.37
- Secondly, the limited amount of climate finance available means that aid for climate change must be spent strategically, for the greatest possible impact. IIED wrote, “There is never going to be enough climate finance… We need to ensure that every penny spent has the biggest possible impact by focusing on the triple win of tackling the underlying drivers of poverty, resource degradation and climate change together”.38 Neil Bird from ODI told us, “ … it is not only a matter of quantity of funding; it is quality of spend”.39
- Thirdly, the outcomes of aid spending needs to be transformative. As Nick Mabey put it, “the role of the development institutions is really quite clear, in that we have got to simultaneously change every economic system and quite a lot of social and political systems globally in two decades”.40 The 2019 Global Environment Outlook report explicitly stated that “transformative changes are needed to meet the Sustainable Development Goals, multilateral environmental agreements and related internationally agreed environmental goals”.41
23.Overall, we heard that it is simply not an option to carry on doing business as usual. In the words of Clare Shakya from IIED:
delivering the SDGs in light of climate change requires a huge shift in how we do development, and we are not seeing that change fast enough. We have got to be looking to tackle the underlying drivers of poverty, resource degradation and climate change together … It requires making our choices differently, understanding what the long-term direction is going to be. No country has developed in the way that we now need to in light of climate change. This requires a huge effort. It requires rethinking the way we do things …42
24.It was therefore disconcerting to learn from ICAI’s 2019 performance review of UK aid for low carbon development that the overall strategy for International Climate Finance has not been updated since 2011. ICAI explain:
There is no up-to-date strategy for UK International Climate Finance as a whole. A strategy from 2011 has not been updated and its current status is unclear. There is only an unpublished ‘new narrative’ established in 2017 that articulates at a high level what UK International Climate Finance is seeking to achieve within a broader context of international climate finance commitments. Key aspects of the UK approach—including its sectoral and geographical priorities and the link between low-carbon development and poverty reduction—have not been articulated. This risks undermining the strategic coherence of the UK’s funding.43
25.It is difficult to see how, without an active, up-to-date strategy that captures the scale of the challenges, the UK can be responding in the way that is required based on the knowledge and understanding of climate change that has been amassed in the past 8 years since the first ICF strategy was written. We asked the three Ministers responsible for administering ICF how the findings of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on the impacts of a 1.5°C temperature rise were being taken on board. Whilst they initially told us that the IPCC report had increased “the focus and the urgency, in terms of the work that we are doing” and has “just amplified all of our ambitions and desire to go faster”,44 it was difficult to tease out exactly what concrete changes, if any, had been made. Rt Hon Claire Perry MP, Minister of State for Energy and Clean Growth, Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy said:
In terms of the report itself, I am not aware that we have particularly changed programme emphasis. I am looking to my other Ministers.45
26.The Government, however, did seem to acknowledge that the lack of an up to date strategy for ICF spending was a problem:
Chair: My understanding is that ICAI has said in a recent review that the strategy has not been formally updated since 2011.
Harriett Baldwin: Just watch this space, Mr Twigg.46
Indeed, since our evidence session, the Government has confirmed through its response to ICAI’s review of UK aid for low carbon development, that the Government will be “refreshing the ICF strategic approach through the forthcoming government spending review” on the basis that, “a cross-departmental update of the ICF approach would be timely and useful, drawing on experience to date”.47
27.The evidence to the Committee’s inquiry implied that an up-to-date strategy for ICF alone would not be sufficient for effectively combating climate change given the scale and cross-cutting nature of this development challenge. Several submissions advocated that climate change should be a priority across all aid spending.48 A submission from CAFOD articulated the point:
To ensure UK climate finance delivers maximum impact, and given the urgency and scale of the challenge, the UK should have a coherent cross-Whitehall and whole-of ODA approach. Tackling climate change must be a strategic priority for all the UK’s international development work.49
28.Government Ministers stressed the importance of treating climate change as a cross-cutting issue in oral evidence to the Committee. Harriett Baldwin MP, Minister of State for Africa at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and Minister of State for International Development, said,
it is very important that, in literally everything that we programme, we are ensuring that we take into account the impact of climate goals.50
Claire Perry added, “this is just a thread that runs through everything”.51
29.We note, however, that some of the evidence criticised DFID and the Government for failing to integrate climate change comprehensively in other aid strategies. DFID’s 2017 Economic Development Strategy (EDS) has met with particular criticism.52 CAFOD expressed concern that climate change is not included as one of the strategy’s 11 key messages, and whilst climate change is mentioned within the strategy as “one of the foremost challenges facing humanity and [ … ] the biggest global threat to sustained economic development”, this is not until page 28 of a 35 page document.53 Christian Aid agreed that DFID’s Economic Development Strategy “at best pays lip service to climate risk” adding that “in recent strategy documents, climate change is presented as a marginal issue, listed alongside many other risks”.54 They expressed concern that investments will consequently be left open to climate risk, or worse, actually exacerbate climate change by investing in high carbon infrastructure.55 The Grantham Research Institute similarly pointed out that climate change “only receives a brief mention under the sector priorities of ‘agriculture’ and ‘infrastructure, energy and urban development’, while ‘extractive industries’ including oil, gas and mining are highlighted as a priority sector for support with no mention of climate change considerations”.56 Dr Ruth Fuller from WWF told the Committee in oral evidence that “climate change is not a major thrust in that document. It feels very much business-as-usual in terms of the models of economic growth that they are championing”.57
30.The new cross-government ‘Africa Strategy’ is also an area where the extent to which climate change has been comprehensively integrated as a key strategic priority is unclear. DFID’s written submission to us pointed to “a new Africa Strategy that also seeks a step change on climate in the African continent”.58 However, the strategy itself remains elusive, as captured by this recent exchange in evidence between the Foreign Affairs Committee and the Minister of State for Africa:
Chair [Mr Tugendhat]: Could you send the whole document [of the Africa Strategy]?
Harriett Baldwin: There is not a document per se. When I say the new approach to Africa, the key things that I would draw the Committee’s attention to are the bullet points that I summarised and the speech that the Prime Minister made in Africa.
Chair [Mr Tugendhat]: So, the 10 bullet points in the speech is the strategy.
Harriett Baldwin: And there were internal PowerPoint presentations and documents at the NSC and things like that, but there is not a published strategy document per se.
Mr Seely: So, when you talk about an Africa strategy you are talking about a work in progress and you have got some headlines.
Harriett Baldwin: The new approach to Africa is the framework that we are working across Government with other Departments to underpin the approach that we are taking over the next decade.
Mr Seely: Yes, but you haven’t got a detailed Africa strategy. What you have got is 10 key messages currently and a speech.
Harriett Baldwin: And something that is working, living and breathing. It is not our intention to publish a crystal document. It is our intention to use that approach to inform Government policy.59
Whilst climate change is, according to the Minister, one of the ‘thematic shifts’ included in the Government’s new approach to Africa,60 without a published strategy it is difficult to track how comprehensively this is being integrated and prioritised across the UK’s aid spending and programming throughout that continent.
31.Climate change is not just one of a number of issues that the UK should address though aid spending. Climate change cuts across everything. The effectiveness of all UK aid spending is dependent on whether the international community rapidly and effectively combats the causes and impacts of climate change. The challenge is huge, it is existential, and there is very little time. The severity of the situation simply cannot be overstated.
32.In this context, climate finance has to be more than meeting a commitment and ticking a box. The UK needs to make sure that all climate finance is being spent in the most effective possible way, to have the greatest impact. Climate finance must be spent strategically, it needs to be spent with urgency, and it has to be transformative. It is therefore disconcerting that there does not appear to be an active strategy underpinning the Government’s International Climate Finance spending. It is further alarming that climate change does not appear to be fully integrated across other aid strategies. This is not the response that a crisis of such magnitude demands.
33.We recommend that the Government designs and adopts a clear, robust strategy for spending climate finance. The strategy should be outcome-oriented, time-sensitive, and based on the latest climate science. At the same time, climate change needs to be recognised as a cross-cutting strategic priority in the UK’s aid spending and should be comprehensively integrated across all development assistance strategies.
20 Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science (CCC0014)
23 Department for International Development; the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy; and the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (CCC0023)
24 Sir Andrew Haines, Professor of Environmental Change and Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (CCC0027)
26 Sir Andrew Haines, Professor of Environmental Change and Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (CCC0027)
35 See for example: Global Witness (CCC0008); Results UK (CCC0011); Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science (CCC0014); Oxfam GB (CCC0017); Marie Stopes International (CCC0020); Q161
48 See for example: Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD) (CCC0009); WWF (CCC0012); Mott MacDonald (CCC0013); Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science (CCC0014); Bond (CCC0018).
52 Department for International Development, January 2017, ‘Economic Development Strategy: prosperity, poverty and meeting global challenges’.
55 Ibid.
57 Q63
58 Department for International Development; the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy; and the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (CCC0023)
59 Foreign Affairs Committee, Oral evidence: The Work of the Minister of State for Africa, HC 900, Qq99–102
Published: 8 May 2018