Vulnerable countries claim one victory in Bali
NUSA DUA, Bali – Monday night heralded one victory for the world’s most vulnerable countries as they secured a decision to have a new body oversee the long-awaited Adaptation Fund established to help finance their adjustment to climate change.
The body is to fall under the authority of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and not the United States-based Global Environmental Facility (GEF). But up to Monday, the GEF was the only contender to run the fund.
“The developing countries opposed this as, among other reasons, they have struggled to obtain funding from the GEF before, and because the GEF council is dominated by the United States – which has not ratified the Kyoto Protocol.
They also felt that the potential size of the fund meant it should have its own board and governance system,” said a release from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED). “The outcome represents a major victory for the countries that have contributed least to climate change but are set to suffer most from its impacts – the least developed countries, small island developing states and Africa.”
Set up under the 1997 agreement, the fund could not be operationalised before now because countries could not agree on, among other things, who was to oversee its operation while safeguarding their best interest. Up to Saturday, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), of which Jamaica is a member, expressed the concern while making clear what they expected from the fund.
“We want to see the sort of institutional arrangements in the governing body (of the fund) in terms of the review process which make it possible for island states to get easy access to financing,” noted Dr Angus Friday, chair of AOSIS and Grenada’s permanent representative to the United Nations. “We would like for financing to be predictable, transparent, simple, timely, and that the transaction costs are kept very low.”
The Adaptation Fund, meanwhile, is financed from a two per cent levy from the value on credits from projects undertaken under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) provided for under Kyoto. The CDM allows Annex 1 (First World countries) to undertake greenhouse gas (GHG) emission projects in developing countries to earn credits to offset their emission targets. These are targets they are obligated to meet as signatories to the Kyoto agreement.
Earlier Monday, Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the UNFCCC, revealed at a press conference that if the fund was operationalised today and the levy turned into cash, it would contain some $36 million.
That is a small sum, but the expectation is that the fund will grow in the years to come.
Meanwhile, the GEF will now act temporarily as the fund’s secretariat but it will sit under the authority of the Conference of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol, which is based in Bonn, Germany, rather than in Washington, DC.
“The secretariat would report to a board composed of representatives of all major world regions in addition to the countries most vulnerable to climate change,” said the IIED release. “The GEF’s status as secretariat will be reviewed after three years.”