Who’s to blame?

Climate negotiations have remained deadlocked over the issue of who should cut down carbon emissions and by how much. The traditional opposing forces have been the developed countries on the one hand and fast-emerging economies like China and India, on the other. The latter have long argued that they should not be expected to cut down emissions because they need to advance their development work and that it is for developed countries to take that step, as they are responsible for pollution and putting all that carbon in the atmosphere.

So, reducing carbon emissions, quite rightly, has been the main issue in climate negotiations, given that it is the root cause of the problem. But also equally important has been the agenda of adaptation, because scientists say extreme weather events related to climate change are already happening and vulnerable communities need support to cope with them. They also warn that some climatic impacts are inevitable, even if all emissions were to be stopped today as the carbon concentrated in the atmosphere will remain there for years and will lead to impacts like floods, landslides, droughts, and a rise in sea levels, among others.

It was mainly for this reason that the issue of adaptation received more or less the same attention at the annual UN climate meet all these years. But suddenly, this time around, the issue is off the table while, experts argue, it should have been given even more importance, given that this text will become the global international treaty if it is signed next year.

Off the table

“Adaptation is just not there on the table,” says Chebet Maikut, head of Uganda’s climate change department. “And that means gloom and doom for us because we are facing all sorts of climate change impacts and if we get no support to adapt to all these, we are doomed.”

Many poor countries were upbeat about some progress on the issue of loss and damage—that basically means they would be getting compensation for the damage done by climate change—during the last UN climate meet in Warsaw. They saw it as a big achievement because many rich countries had resisted the idea for years, fearing that poor countries could claim compensation for all kinds of weather-related disasters by terming them as climate impacts. But now, forget loss and damage, even the issue of adaptation has been kept at bay.

An investigation I did for the BBC last month found that more than 400 adaptation projects prepared by Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in the past 14 years are at risk of being abandoned. Of the 500 plus projects identified under the National Adaptation Programmes of Action (NAPA) that 48 LDCs had to prepare under the UN convention, less than a fifth has been implemented. The funding agency, the Global Environment Facility, has made it clear it has no money left. As the remaining over 400 projects await funding, these poorest countries are now required to prepare another climate adaptation plan. The National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) is being described as mid- and long-term.

 In the lurch

Experts argue that even when immediate and urgent projects under NAPA were not implemented, how might the long term NAP ones be actioned. NAPA at least had a designated funding mechanism—Least Developed Countries Fund—for LDCs. NAP funding, officials say, will mainly be from the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which will be accessible to developing countries as well. This means that the 48 LDCs will now have to compete with over 100 developing countries—if the GCF gets some money, that is. The fund aims to have $100 billion by 2020 and so far, it has secured only about 10 billion dollars of commitment. Even UN officials have hinted that poor countries may now have to forget NAPA and move on to NAPs.

As if all this were not enough, LDCs say they now face a situation where their issue is totally being forgotten. As if to remind negotiators in Lima, after the climate meet began two weeks ago, the United Nations Environment Programme came up with a warning. It said, “Even if global greenhouse gas emissions are cut to the level required to keep global temperature rise below 2°C this century, the cost of adapting to climate change in developing countries is likely to reach two to three times the previous estimates of $70-100 billion per year by 2050.”

Those words seem to have fallen into deaf ears.

Khadka is a BBC journalist based in London and can be reached at [email protected]