Author: Ajay Chhibber

Comment: Adaptation starts here

Life changing access to fresh water sources in Vanuatu’s Ekipe village has helped the community deal with increased water salinity from rising sea levels.

For the families in Ekipe and others like them throughout the Pacific islands, climate change threatens their very survival.

However, successful adaptation to the changes around them will require investments much larger in scale than merely helping one village at a time. Funding will depend on the outcome of international climate change negotiations.

In the lead-up to this week’s climate change summit in Cancun, Mexico, the UN Secretary-General’s Advisory Group on Climate Finance concluded that it will be “challenging but feasible to reach the goal of mobilizing US$100 billion annually for climate actions in developing countries”.

According to the same panel, which included Larry Summers, Nicholas Stern, George Soros, and the Hon Bob McMullan from Australia, the funding for the small island developing states will come mostly in the form of grants and highly concessional loans. However, achieving the financial target is not a panacea, especially if the new funding is to be disbursed through disjointed projects and separate donor channels as has been often the case in the past.

Unless sufficiently planned, financial aid inflows can add significant strains on national public finance systems and result in having little impact on climate change adaptation.

For climate finance to be quickly accessed, effectively absorbed and wisely spent, it will be crucial for governments and donors alike to ramp up their policies, budgets and aid systems.

Some very concrete actions can help to strengthen effectiveness of the climate finance in the Pacific: First, initiatives to address climate change need to be woven into all sectors of government planning and budgeting, not merely into the work of the environment offices which are often woefully underfunded.

Climate change affects agriculture, for example, so budget planning would need to bring in the relevant ministry or office to ensure that agricultural extension programmes offer ways and means to grow alternative crops in the face of increased salinization of farm land.

This approach to budgeting and planning will require much closer coordination between central and line ministries, between national and provincial authorities, and between legislative and executive branches. Linked to that, climate finance should be seen as a public investment in building a climate resilient future of Pacific island countries rather than as an add-on or a parallel exercise to the regular national budgeting process.

Including climate finance in broader development planning can help reinforce national priorities and contribute to the integrity and effectiveness of national budgets. Furthermore, by combining international with domestic sources of financing, climate change initiatives can be sustained over time even if donor funding comes to an end. Finally, donors themselves could help those countries that receive their support by taking a more unified approach, rather than each supporting individual projects as a primary means of delivering climate finance. For example, a Pacific island government compiles dozens of donor reports every month, receives several donor visits every week and deals with multiple bilateral and multilateral donors every day.

Improved coordination and joint programming amongst donors would go a long way to streamlining their support and reducing the burden on those countries they are assisting.

The Pacific region can learn from experiences of other developing countries, several of which are pooling various aid channels through multi-donor climate funds.

In Indonesia and Cambodia, for example, such international pooled funds are enabling the governments themselves to decide how, when and where the funds should be spent. A pooled source of funding for countries to tap into actually reduces overlap of donor-supported initiatives and cuts transaction costs.

In both Indonesia and Cambodia, the UN Development Programme has helped to set up the trust funds and is administering them on an interim basis until the appointment of national trustees or direct budgetary support is adopted. Furthermore, multi-donor trust funds are not new to the Pacific. The successful Tuvalu Trust Fund, which was established in 1980s with support from New Zealand, the United Kingdom and UNDP, has been used to finance development of the country. This kind of trust fund approach, which already has a track record of pooling donor resources for development in Tuvalu, could be applied across the Pacific for climate finance.

We are entering a new era in which a dramatic surge in climate finance from public and private sources is likely to transform the way international development works. If new funding is used wisely, efficiently and with the involvement of those who will benefit from it, the Pacific countries have a better chance of reducing risks caused by climate-related disasters. Having already placed climate finance on the agenda of the Pacific Forum Leaders and its ministerial groups, the region is well positioned to be at the forefront of climate change adaptation and the financing for it.

Ultimately, a sharper focus on climate finance effectiveness will help to bring about a climate-resilient future and better human development opportunities for villagers in Ekipe and in many other communities across the vast Pacific Ocean.

Ajay Chhibber is Assistant Secretary-General of the United Nations, Assistant Administrator of the United Nations Development Program and Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific.

All comment pieces are the sole view of the author and do not reflect the editorial policy of Minivan News. If you would like to write an opinion piece, please send proposals to [email protected]

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Comment: Asian growth rebounds – must now focus on broader development goals

As Asia rebounds from the Global Economic Crisis, and resumes rapid economic growth, a big question will be whether Asia will lead the world in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) – a set of eight broader development goals for 2015 to which world leaders signed on in 2000 at the United Nations.

At a meeting held in Jakarta on August 2 and 3, Asian ministers and experts discussed the region’s progress and strategies to accelerate it.

Progress on the MDG’s can be described as uneven – some good, some bad and some ugly.

First the good news: Asia has succeeded in the aggregate in reducing poverty since 1990 by some 500 million people. The global crisis of 2008-2009 has halted this progress and may even increase the number of poor by some 30-40 million people. As growth is restored poverty reduction will resume although with a lag and those that fell back into poverty will need greater support to climb back. Asia has also made good progress on education: particularly on enrollment, and quite noteworthy is the increase in girl’s enrollment.

Infant mortality has also declined and helps explain the rise in life expectancy in the region as immunization programs have been successfully rolled out in many parts of Asia. More than half of Asia’s population now have access to safe drinking water. Across the region China, Vietnam, Thailand , Malaysia, Iran, Sri Lanka and some Pacific Island countries as well as Maldives stand out in making the most dramatic progress across a wide range of MDGs.

Now to turn to the bad: much less progress has been made on health indicators such as maternal mortality, as well as on sanitation and environmental goals.

In many countries in Asia well organised health systems – especially in rural areas – do not exist. Even in those that have them, like China and Vietnam, they have deteriorated and out of pocket expenditures have risen to amongst the highest in the world.

Basic sanitation has also not been accorded the highest priority in many parts of Asia leading to greater propensity of health epidemics.

While the carbon foot print per capita in many parts of Asia remains small because of low incomes, the carbon intensity of development in Asia as a whole remains very high and China is now the largest consumer of energy in the world. Degradation of land and water systems also has a worrisome trajectory.

Growth has helped reduce poverty but rising inequality in almost every country in Asia has enhanced social tensions and reduced the potential impact of growth on poverty reduction. Had inequality remained the same as in 1990, another 300 million people could have climbed out of poverty for the same level of growth.

Incomes at the top of the distribution have grown faster than those in the bottom. Though reasons behind rising inequality are complex, some broad themes emerge. First, there has been a relative neglect of the agriculture sector by the development community both at the national and international levels. Second, globalisation processes favour skilled labour against unskilled labour – leading to slower growth of wages among the poor.

In this context, Asian countries that have grown rapidly over a decade, but have not seen substantial reduction in poverty and hunger rates will need to focus specifically on the inclusiveness of their growth strategy.

This is also is the ugly side to the Asia story; which is that of hunger and malnutrition; with almost 600 million people going to bed hungry every day. The irony is that over this period Asia has eliminated the scourge of famines and per capita foodgrain availability has increased, yet hunger affects millions.

Asia’s social assistance programs and food subsidy systems have not succeeded in reaching these hungry people. The massive rise in food prices in 2006-2008 had a hugely disproportionate effect on the poor, with the bottom quintile seeing a decline in purchasing power by 24 percent versus only a decline of 4 percent of purchasing power for the top quintile.

Well targeted conditional cash transfer programs – such as those in Latin America and cash for work programs such as the Mahatma Gandhi Employment Guarantee Program in India could help the hungry get the minimum needed to avoid hunger and keep their children sufficiently nourished.

The resources and political will exist in Asia to fix these problems. As world leaders gather in September at the UN for the MDG Summit there is much to learn from Asia and much to be gained by renewing the political will within Asia to try and accelerate progress on the MDGs.

As growth resumes in Asia the smaller resource rich Asian economies such as Mongolia, Laos, and Papua New Guinea are on the verge of a dramatic increase in their resource base to tackle the MDG’s. The attainment of MDGs offers a good guidepost to ensure that their resource boom does not become a resource curse, because the MDGs offer a much broader yardstick of development than income alone.

In the rapidly growing export led economies of Asia, reducing inequality by ensuring a much more inclusive development strategy, improving social protection for health, old age and natural disasters is vital for ensuring that those who get out of poverty do not fall back into it permanently.

Greater regional integration is vital to ensure that the benefits of rapid growth in the region benefit all. Free trade agreements are stitching together, slowly but gradually, a common market; but pan Asian infrastructure still lags behind and is vital to ensure that prosperity spreads across Asia.

Above all Asia must begin systematically to address social and cultural inequities: gender, caste and ethnic to ensure that not only will huge progress be made to achieve MDGs by 2015 but that an Asian renaissance will be triggered to lead to an Asian century.

Ajay Chhibber is UN Assistant Secretary General, UNDP Assistant Administrator and Director for UNDP’s Regional Bureau for Asia and the Pacific.

All comment pieces are the sole view of the author and do not reflect the editorial policy of Minivan News. If you would like to write an opinion piece, please send proposals to [email protected]

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