A tiny U.N. fund that is starting to help developing nations adapt to climate change could expand to manage part of a planned $100 billion aid mechanism to be debated at U.N. talks in Mexico, the chair of the fund said.
Developing nations reckon the existing Adaptation Fund, which signed its first deal last week to give $8.6 million to Senegal to fight coastal erosion, could overcome objections from donors to win a wider role, Farrukh Iqbal Khan told Reuters.
Almost 200 nations will meet in the Mexican resort of Cancun from November 29 to December 10 to discuss measures including a new “green fund” to help the poor shift from fossil fuels and adapt to floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising sea levels.
“The Adaptation Fund has grown after a great deal of effort over many years … it is up and running and is an independent, international entity,” Khan, a senior Pakistani official, said in a telephone interview.
“Developing countries are very clear — it could be the main adaptation window in the larger financial mechanism attached to the global green fund,” he said.
The Adaptation Fund is expected to total $450 million by 2012, a fraction of aid meant to rise to $100 billion a year from 2020 under a plan agreed at the Copenhagen climate summit last year to help developing nations cope with global warming.
The planned new green fund would manage the $100 billion to cover adaptation, aid to developing nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions and mechanisms to share clean-energy technologies.
Rich, poor
Some donors are reluctant to let the Adaptation Fund take a wider role. About two-thirds of its board are from developing countries, meaning recipients have most say.
Donors “do have a point there, that there should be equal representation,” Khan said. But he said the fund had proved that it could take decisions by consensus.
Another hurdle is that the Adaptation Fund is part of the U.N.’s existing Kyoto Protocol for cutting greenhouse gas emissions until 2012. Kyoto does not include the United States, which never ratified the 1997 U.N. deal.
Its funds come from a 2 percent levy on green projects in developing nations under Kyoto. Separately this year, Spain contributed 45 million euros ($60.79 million) and Germany 10 million euros.
Apart from Senegal, the fund has approved but not yet signed a $5.7 million deal with Honduras to protect water supplies for 13,000 households in Tegucigalpa from more powerful storms. Khan said most projects so far focused on water and agriculture.
Other projects include protecting northern Pakistan from floods caused by a melt of Himalayan glacial lakes or a scheme to safeguard fresh water in the Maldives from storms bringing more salt water onto the Indian Ocean islands.
He said there were tough choices in deciding funds in a little-studied field of the “economics of adaptation.” That included judgments about, for instance, which projects might save most lives or do most to boost economic growth.
