“We Are Not Waiting for Money to Come”

Helvetas and Saleemul Huq, director of the International Center for Climate Change & Development (ICCCAD) in Bangladesh, discussed how the developing world is taking the lead when it comes to climate change mitigation and adaptation.

More than two years have passed since the Paris Agreement was adopted, and over a year since it entered into force. Has there been any tangible impact on developing countries?

If we aggregate up, in Paris the world decided to collectively decarbonize the global economy. Now it’s a matter of how fast we do it. And the fastest country so far is China. It used to be extremely dependent on coal for energy. Now China has decided not to use its vast coal reserves as was planned before. Instead, it is investing more than anyone else in the world in ramping up renewable energy, particularly solar and wind, and has the highest monetary investment in transitioning from fossil fuels to renewables. I’ll contrast the Paris Agreement with the Kyoto Protocol. There are fundamental design differences. The Kyoto Protocol was a top-down imposition. Countries didn’t feel they owned it. The Paris Agreement is a voluntary agreement. Countries say what they are prepared to do and feel ownership for their actions. The Paris Agreement is a bottom-up solution. Not just governments, but governors, mayors, companies, citizens – everyone can contribute to its implementation.

Developed countries agreed to provide $100 billion each year in climate finance by 2020 under the Paris Agreement. But they don’t seem to be in a rush to act on their commitments. Do you believe the world will deliver on them by 2020?
We certainly hope they will, but the 100 billion a year is not the big story. There are already trillions invested in climate change resilience and mitigation around the world. Coming back to the example of China: its program is worth $350 billion. One after one, countries around the world are taking action. India. South Africa. Brazil. Indonesia. Even poor countries like Bangladesh. We are transitioning, and we’re not waiting for money to come. It’s good if it came, but it’s more of a moral obligation than a practical necessity.

Bangladesh was the first among developing countries to set up a climate change resilience fund. Ethiopia, Rwanda and Kenya have also set up national climate change funds. How much can these funds contribute to the cause?

The finance minister of my country, Bangladesh, has been allocating roughly a $100 million equivalent in the national budget every year for implementing the climate change strategy and action plan. We have already spent $900 million of our own money. That’s much more than we have ever received from the developed countries.

You have talked about the massive efforts of China to transit from fossil fuels to renewables. What about least developed countries like Bangladesh? They account for a small share of global greenhouse gas emissions. How can they contribute to climate mitigation?

I’ll give an example. In Bangladesh, more than 4,000,000 households now have a solar panel for lighting. The main reason for buying these solar panels is children’s education. Kids need lights to do their homework. Another driver is the need to charge mobile phones. In this case, the education and communication are the main benefits, and the environmental impact is the co-benefit.

There are two big problems that often prevent the widespread use of solar panels. One is high upfront costs. Secondly, if something goes wrong, no one knows how to fix it. The new system that we launched is based on companies offering consumers loans for buying panels. The monthly cost of repaying the loan is slightly lower than what they previously spent on kerosene. The second innovation is after-sale service support. Consumers can call the company if something doesn’t work and it either repairs the panel or replaces the broken part, which is usually the battery.

The Green Climate Fund (GCF), established within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to support climate action in developing countries, has been known to refuse to approve some projects, in particular from Ethiopia and Bangladesh, that focus too much on development and not enough on climate change. Do you agree or disagree with the Fund’s decision?

I was very upset when the GCF rejected the proposal from Bangladesh. Incidentally, the last board meeting approved it. To be fair to them, they are a new institution and are still finding out what works and what doesn’t.

The climate change vulnerability is increasingly becoming so pervasive that anything to do with building resilience can be justified when allocating funding.

What clear guidelines, in your opinion, could the Green Climate Fund use to choose which projects to fund?

The problem is that GCF is approving submissions on a project by project basis. Now they only have $10 billion. It will be even more difficult when the money ramps up. If they have $100 billion eventually, it will be simply impossible. They will have to sit 24/7 to look at one project a minute. They have to switch from project approvals to programmatic funding, to the devolution of responsibility: to start allocating money to countries, which then select themselves which projects to fund, according to set criteria and under guidance.

The approach that you are suggesting requires more trust between donors and recipients. Could you tell us about specific cases of success or failure in building monitoring and accountability systems at the donor and recipient levels?

At the donor level, we want clarity. There are two markers for climate change action: mitigation and adaptation. The former is relatively clear, but the latter is more complex. A lot of projects are double-counted: the money is counted both as adaptation and as development aid since they often overlap. This is normal: both donors and recipients double-count in their reporting. But sometimes development projects that have nothing to do with adaptation are still counted towards it.

I’ll give an example. The OECD Development Assistance Committee has a system of accounting and transparency for development aid provided by its members, developed countries, referred to as the so-called “Rio Markers”. Each participating country has to report how much money it has given for climate change action, and they self-assess: only adaptation, only mitigation, or mixed. It’s prone to subjectivity in interpretation: there are no rules.

Professor Timmons Roberts at Brown University in the U.S. did an interesting study with his students: they went through the whole database of these self-assessed reports. They found that one third of them were correct, one third could be given a benefit of the doubt, but one third was completely misplaced: they claimed to be adaptation, but had nothing to do with it. So they claimed to give us, developing countries, more money for adaptation than they actually did.

Transparency should also be on the recipient side. To give an example, my organization is helping the government of Bangladesh set up an open and transparent web-based system of tracking climate finance: how much we receive and where we spend it. Anybody can access it: not just the donors, but also the citizens of the country. They have the right to know what is being done with the money that their government is getting.

Hurricane Matthew killed hundreds of people in Haiti, over 40 in the United States, and not a single person in Cuba. Cuba is often praised for its surprisingly efficient disaster preparedness. Are there more examples of developing countries finding costeffective and efficient adaptation measures?

Climate change is not a unidirectional problem where the rich countries have the solution and then it’s transferred to the poor countries. We all learn from each other. The North has a lot to learn from the South. For example, I, a Bangladeshi, have come to Zurich to share my expertise with Swiss people.

Bangladesh has already turned the narrative around, from being the most vulnerable to becoming the most adaptive country. In 1970 we had a cyclone that killed more than 300,000 people. In 1991, 100,000 people. Since then we have implemented a big program of cyclone awareness and shelter preparedness. Today Bangladesh can successfully evacuate more than 2.5 million people in case of a cyclone. It’s one of the most successful systems in the world. In the last cyclone, we brought the death toll down to 2000, and most of these victims were fishermen, who were at sea and didn’t hear the warning.

Another example: the most vulnerable part of Bangladesh is the low-line coastal area, not just because of cyclones, but also due to the creeping sea level rise, which results in salinity intrusion. To prevent people from having to drink saline water, we capture rainwater.

The same problem affects rice crops, which are suffering from saline intrusions. So the Bangladeshi rice researchers have developed about 8-10 salt-tolerant varieties of rice, and now millions of farmers in coastal Bangladesh are using them.

There are limits to adaptation. Scientists can develop varieties that are tolerant to salinity – let’s say four parts per thousand (normal freshwater salinity is 0.5ppt or less). But the salinity goes up to six, and we have to develop a new variety. And then it goes to 8ppt… So we have to play catch up. At some point, you can’t grow rice anymore. And then the farmers switch to shrimp and prawn farming, which grow in salt water. It is also a form of adaptation.

We have talked about positive examples, let’s talk about a negative one. In 2017 Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico. It’s not surprising that the effects were devastating since it was the country’s worst natural disaster on record. But what is surprising is the slow recovery. Five months after the disaster, one-third of the island’s population still lived without electricity. And it is not even a least developed country. What is your assessment of the situation?

It’s a reflection of a generalization that can be applied to the whole world: the most vulnerable communities tend to be the poorest. But also rich countries like the U.S. can be highly vulnerable. Puerto Rico is the poorest territory of the United States. And the U.S. has done almost nothing to help them. They are neglected by their own government.

An even better example of maladaptation is Houston, which got hit by Hurricane Harvey. A rich city, but totally unprepared. The main Harvey impact was not the hurricane itself, it was
the rain that never stopped. And the whole place was flooded. The draining system wasn’t designed to get rid of the water quickly. It’s a good example of a rich city that built infrastructure in a way that made it more vulnerable.

Developing countries are the primary victims of anthropogenic climate change for which they bear no historical responsibility: this is one of the main arguments in favor of the developed world supporting their adaptation and mitigation efforts. At the same time, there are people like Trump’s advisors HR McMaster and Gary Cohn who say that “The world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage.” What is your take on that?

What is happening in the U.S. is very interesting. Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, abiding by his predecessor’s commitments as President. He and his administration are trying to promote coal and to reverse Obama’s pledges.

But none of it is working. The United States is on track to fulfill the pledges made by Obama. Despite Trump, the world has changed, and no one is investing in coal. Everyone is investing in renewables. It’s just an economic decision. Even Republican governors of states like Texas are investing in renewables because it makes sense. It creates jobs, it’s clean, it delivers. Trump can’t hold the tide back.

Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement has generated a bottom-up movement of people: governors of states like California’s Jerry Brown, mayors of cities like New York’s Bill de Blasio, CEOs of companies like Walmart, heads of agencies, NGOs, universities, and the U.S. people are saying that they’re in the Paris Agreement.

The Paris accord required all the leaders to come to an agreement. But we don’t need the leaders’ permission to take it into action. I don’t need my president to give me authority. You don’t need your president to give you authority.

What the Paris Agreement has unleashed is the global movement. The momentum is definitely in our favor. There is a generational gap: people who want to implement the agreement are usually younger people. So the time is on our side.