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.

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