NGOs’ focus on climate financing per se won’t change global realities

An international activist organisation says these will cost them five times what they are currently spending on healthcare.

A UK charity operating in 59 countries and respectfully going by the name Tearfund, has issued an assessment based on a sample of 11 state budgets to calculate their per capita expenditures.    

Regrettably without showing the details of that sampling, primarily the sort of expenditures that constitute adapting to climate change, the Tearfund report says that expected climate adaptation costs for Eritrea amount to 22.7 per cent of its GDP – compared with 4.46 per cent for healthcare costs.

Mauritania will need to spend more than four times as much on climate adaptation as it does on healthcare, at 13.4 per cent compared with 3.3 per cent.

It said the 11 countries sampled on average emit 27 times less per person than the global average, heaping the weight of the blame on the United States – with US$1.9tn (£1.6tn) (annually, presumably) in damage to other countries from the effects of its greenhouse gas emissions.

That stated, one NGO thinks it has hit the crux of the matter, until it is realised that the United States is the source of a quarter and in certain cases up to a whole half of what United Nations agencies do on a routine basis, the funding and physical supplies.

Obviously, this capacity is linked with industrial emissions and other spheres of energy consumption, yielding the revenues or aggregate economic activity that make it the country the number one economy in the world.

The report lets African countries off the hook rather too easily by focusing on totality of global emissions instead of local causes of climate change intensity.

Tree felling would be one of these factors, with the setting of large herds of livestock on streams and river sources that dry up after a while another critical factor.

That said, the global emissions paradigm skips the fact that Israel – just as an example – was and indeed still is largely desert but it is a leading exporter of fruit and vegetables to Europe.

The Tearfund analysis would hardly explain why a whole third of global wheat exports were sourced from Ukraine and Russia, as if land – vast plains – is scarce elsewhere.

Tearful’s blaming of the US and others for emissions or seeking US$100bn adaption funds could be perceived as largely a non-starter.

Climate activists far too often see this sphere as the spot where ‘the global 99 per cent’ can make the ‘global one per cent’ of the earth’s population who are responsible for 90 per cent of emissions with their huge cars, frequent air travel and vast heating or cooling needs in their sumptuous residences, pay especially dearly for climate adaptation.

Yet the sorting out of the vagaries of climate change impacts involves level-headed analysis that must focus on how land will attract the money needed for it to improve and withstand such vagaries.

It is a title deed that can fetch a bank loan for a well or a dam for farms and ranches nearby, not communal ownership of land seeking budget cash or multilateral loans for water projects.