Climate Aid — Too Narrow?

At the Cancun Climate Change conference in December, the United States and other developed nations announced their support for a $100 billion “Green Climate” fund. A significant fraction of those funds were allocated to support “climate aid” to developing countries. Rich, developed countries tend to be in temperate regions distant from the direct impacts of climate change, whereas many developing countries are in tropical climates immediately vulnerable to rising sea levels and temperature fluctuations.

By March, talks on the Green Climate fund had already been postponed. The genesis of the fund is rooted in the notion that developing nations must contribute to emissions reductions, but face deleterious economic effects from reduction strategies and lack the requisite resources to mitigate the economic burdens of such schemes. Climate aid is essentially a hybrid form of foreign aid, although developing countries have now suggested that the first world has an obligation to remedy past pollution with climate aid now.
The problem with climate aid is that it’s an inherently nebulous term. The idea that the global community should contribute to greenhouse gas mitigation is a noble one, but what exactly does that entail? Climate aid can be incredibly expansive: subsidies for domestic food security could reduce emissions by lowering the amount of food transported to feed a given nation; funds for green energy infrastructure could lower greenhouse gas output. As Andrew Revkin at the New York Times notes, the scope of the climate fund is further hampered by questions over which environmental factors were triggered by climate change. Should climate aid money be used to combat serious environmental issues that remain on the periphery of the climate change debate?
This lack of a solid definition for climate aid leaves the Green Climate fund fraught with diplomatic pitfalls. It’s likely that the allocation of funds would be largely subjective, and it would be particularly difficult for the international community to arbitrate issues in which countries may or may not be deserving of support. Furthermore, if the money were given to countries in bulk, with no mandate on how that money should be spent, climate aid would fall into the same traps of misuse and corruption that have plagued foreign aid for the past half century.
Yet the great paradox with climate aid is that its definition may need to be broadened. The negotiations at Kyoto, Copenhagen, and Cancun were rightfully devoted to the issue of climate change, but the countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change are oftentimes mired in a state of overall environmental degradation. Even if climate negotiators could hash out a fund that pinpointed issues directly related to climate change, they would be neglecting key environmental issues like biodiversity loss, water management, and deforestation. These are issues intrinsic to the cyclical nature of environmental management that might still be excluded from the expansive nature of climate aid.
The gamut of global environmental issues transcends climate change, and very few of these issues exist within the confines of well-delineated borders. Depleted rivers and polluted water basins, biodiversity loss, eutrophication – all of these are issues that must be contended with on a regional, if not international, level. Perhaps the international community should sponsor the creation of a “Green Fund” that makes no qualms about supporting the mitigation of environmental issues outside the traditional scope of climate change.
Such a fund is heretical in the international community. Its scope would be even more confusingly broad than that of the currently proposed “Green Fund,” and it would surely face many of the same hazards. Yet the design of this fund could make the allocation process simpler; if policymakers were not concerned with ensuring that all grants directly fight climate change and instead targeted dire environmental issues, it would be justifiable to earmark money for a specific purpose. The distribution body for the Fund could sponsor interstate negotiations on regional environmental issues while providing financing for key projects.
This all-encompassing view of environmental support is unlikely to take hold soon. Until it does, policymakers should not be surprised to find a variety of environmental issues infiltrating the climate aid mechanism.
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