by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Europe and Central Asia
Looks like Sarkozy’s the latest European leader to start getting behind convergence of national emission entitlements to equal per capita levels as the central principle in how to share out a global emissions budget. Here’s an excerpt from the communique from his talks with Angela Merkel:
France and Germany consider paramount the goal to achieve a global agreement in the framework of the United Nations for the post 2012 period, based on the principle of common but differentiated responsibility. The international climate regime should be based on legitimate principles of equity, such as long-term convergence of emission levels per capita in the various countries.
Full Elysee statement here; for the backstory, start here.
by Alex Evans | Jun 14, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security, Economics and development
At a seminar held yesterday as part of IPPR’s Commission on National Security, we got onto a discussion of how far aid donors still need to go in sorting out their approach on conflict prevention. The problem isn’t with the specialist departments that deal with conflict within donor agencies – which are often excellent (e.g. the CHASE department in DFID) – but rather with long-term systemic issue areas that just aren’t mainstreamed properly throughout donors’ work. For me, four spring to mind.
First, governance. I’ve written about this at length before on GD, and I still think the same now. When European donors think governance, they think about techie work in the executive branch: public financial management, anti-corruption commissions, that sort of thing. What they overlook is the politics: elections, what happens in the smoke-filled rooms of the ruling party, the process of bargaining between states and citizens. And it’s here that conflict risk – or risk reduction – is often to be found.
Second, resilience. Many donors have great work underway on specific areas of resilience – like peacebuilding, adaptation to climate change or disaster risk reduction. But donors often fail to identify the syngergies between these different kinds of resilience work – as International Alert did in their report on climate adaptation and peacebuilding last year. How about a more joined-up approach across the board that focuses really hard on identifying the sources of resilience in different developing countries, and then working to build them up? After all, about the only thing that’s clear about the next couple of decades is that they’ll be increasingly turbulent. You wouldn’t know it from looking at donors’ country programmes.
Third, scarcity. Disputes over land in Kenya; water as a threat multiplier in Darfur; riots over food and energy prices in more than 30 countries this year alone; the looming shadow of climate change. Scarcity issues are set to become one of the principal obstacles to achieving the MDGs, and a major source of increased conflict risk. Helping partner countries to manage competing claims to scarce resources – at all levels from local to global – should be a core competence in donors’ policy and programme work alike. Is it? Nope.
Fourth, counter-insurgency and fourth generation warfare. Whether you’re looking at the Taliban in Afghanistan, MEND in Nigeria, drug lords in Mexico or organised crime in the Balkans, there are plenty of participants in the ‘global bazaar of violence’ who are interested in hollowing out weak states – not the same as causing them to collapse, as Daniel and I were discussing earlier this week – so as to give them the space and legitimacy to operate as they want. Alas, it’s the military coming up with the really innovative approaches on this – not aid donors.
As should already be clear, these aren’t so much new agendas for aid donors, as cross-cutting ones: involving joining up the dots between current areas of work, being willing to take more risks, and realising that being an effective donor in the 21st century is as much about influence and the quality of your people as it’s about cash.
They also involve forging a lot of new, more coherent relationships: with new donors (like the Gates Foundation); with new country players (like China); and – perhaps most of all – with other parts of government (c.f. DFID and the the Foreign Office).
But here’s a key point: it’s crucial that we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I always hesitate when I hear people in the UK calling for DFID to be merged back into the Foreign Office, or for the International Development Act to be revised or scrapped. True, there are [numerous] times when DFID needs to interpret its poverty reduction mission with a bit more verve and imagination. But remember why it was necessary in the first place to make DFID independent and to create the Act to protect it.
We do need a more substantive conversation about joining up the dots on aid and foreign policy – both in Britain and internationally – in order to get better at conflict prevention. But before we can start it, there need to be some upfront guarantees of no sliding back to aid being a tool for pursuing narrow, short-term national interests.
by Alex Evans | Jun 13, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system
Ahead of this weekend’s G8 Finance Ministers’ meeting, the treasury secretaries of Japan, the US and the UK have launched a call for G8 countries to commit cash to two World Bank funds – one on technology transfer for major developing country emitters, and one to help finance adaptation costs. The US will apparently hold a pledging conference later this year to try to raise an initial $10 billion; the three countries have pledged $5 billion of that.
Naturally, Global Dashboard readers will immediately jump to the question: is the UK’s contribution loans or grant aid? Let’s be very clear from the outset: the word “donate”, used in briefing the FT, means “to present as a gift, grant or contribution”. The Treasury website is silent about the new initiative, but fear not: we’ll be keeping our eyes peeled on this one.
In other news, Gordon Brown has confirmed he’ll go to the Saudis’ summit conference on oil prices (where it looks like he may be the only head of state attending). The Guardian tells us he thinks that
it would be necessary to build 1,000 nuclear power stations worldwide to combat … what he described as the world’s oil addiction.
Sigh. Again: petrol and electricity ain’t the same thing, Gordon…
by Alex Evans | Jun 3, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity
One of the catches with this week’s UN food summit is that it’s not immediately clear just what deal the various heads of state and ministers assembled here are supposed to cut – and that leaves the (hundreds of) journalists here looking for story angles. Look at some of the main issues at play in the food prices issue and you start to see their problem:
Humanitarian relief. The World Food Programme’s urgent appeal for $755m needed to keep feeding the 73 million people dependent on it for help has been making headlines all spring – but now the funding gap has been plugged, thanks to a half a billion dollar donation from Saudi Arabia.
(Incidentally, it’s a mystery on a par with the Marie Celeste as to why WFP didn’t wait until the summit to announce the cash. Here in Rome, it would have been the story from the summit. As it was, the news – announced late on a Friday afternoon – sank with hardly a trace. One leading food journalist I spoke to this morning said he didn’t get the press release until two days later. You couldn’t make it up…)
Trade. Numerous policymakers have pointed to the long term importance of trade reform, and pushing ahead with the Doha Development Round. But as far as this summit is concerned, that’s off the agenda, since the Doha Round has its own, separate, negotiations.
Changing diet patterns. The growth of a global middle class eating a grain-intensive western diet is the single biggest driver of rising prices, and as I noted in another post earlier today, it raises the awesomely complex and politically difficult question of fair shares. But there’s no chance of any substantive discussion of that here this week.
Investing in agricultural supply. Everyone agrees that a ‘new green revolution’, or whatever you want to call it, will be essential given that demand is set to rise 50% by 2030. But while the UN’s High Level Task Force sets out a strong analysis in its newly published paper on elements of a comprehensive strategy, it’s hard to see what actual deal this week’s summit could cut in this area. Admittedly, several countries are likely to announce major new funding commitments while they’re here. But the amounts will have to be very big to become the story of the week.
So what does that leave? If I worked for the UN Secretary-General, I’d be putting all of my effort into persuading one or two of the really big producers who’ve imposed export restrictions on crops – like India, Russia, Kazakhstan or Argentina – to announce an easing of those restrictions. That would mark an important step forward, and represent a triumph for the UN and its Secretary-General.
But without that, it looks like the story of the week is likely to be about biofuels – where it’s hard to see any great strides towards consensus being made here in Rome. On the contrary, with the US and Brazil defending biofuels to the hilt even as others (including FAO head Jacques Diouf) fire broadsides off against feeding crops to cars, the risk is of a damaging spat. That will make for a lively story, if it becomes the angle that journalists here go for – but could also lead to all sides entrenching their positions, which would be a Bad Thing.
by Alex Evans | Jun 3, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Economics and development
The FT’s Gideon Rachman has a terrific column today mulling over the question that this week’s UN food summit in Rome is likely to sweep politely beneath the carpet: the question of fair shares to scarce global commodities like energy, food and ‘airspace’ for our emissions.
It is all very awkward. China and India are getting richer. And it appears their new middle classes want all the things we want: cars, washing machines, even meat. Here in the west, we have to restrain ourselves from saying: “Stop. You can’t live like us. The planet can’t stand it. And our wallets can’t stand it. Have you seen the price of petrol?”
Global equity is the awkward issue lying behind the world food crisis. In the long run, it will also prove fundamental to discussions on energy and global warming.
Gideon’s clearly right that asking China, India and other emerging economies to stay poor is a total non-starter (politically as well as morally) – but on the other hand (as his article also makes clear), the problem is that a burgeoning global middle class also risks leaving the world’s poor in an untenable position, now that supplies of energy, food, water, land and ‘airspace’ for our emissions are all getting scarce. Moises Naim asked in a recent LA Times editorial whether the world could afford a middle class – he might have asked whether the poor can afford one, too.
On climate change, at least, we’ve known for a while where the debate needs to go. Given that stabilising the climate will necessarily entail sharing out a safe global ‘emissions budget’, we can’t duck the question of how to share such a budget out – and, by extension, how to satisfy the different equity claims of both emerging economies and least developed countries. How to do that? In a nutshell, through enshrining the principle of fair shares to the global common resource of the atmosphere through a process of convergence to equal per capita emission rights by some agreed date (2030, 2050, the day after tomorrow – whatever countries can hammer out). More and more people in the climate debate are now accepting that proposition (Nick Stern being a notable recent convert), and discussion of it ought to figure heavily on the road to next year’s Copenhagen summit.
With food, though, it’s very much harder to see how the principle of fair shares can be operationalised. At this week’s UN food summmit, the demand side effects of changing diet patterns aren’t even being talked about seriously, even though most analysts agree they’re the most important driver of rising food prices.
Still, one starting point would be to get some basic analytical tools up on the web. If I want to calculate my lifestyle’s carbon footprint, there are any number of websites that will allow me to do just that – and to see whether I’m living within or beyond my ‘fair share’ of the atmosphere. But if I look for a calculator to figure out my diet’s “grain footprint” – the amount of wheat, corn and other cereals needed not just for my daily bread, but (more significantly) the meat, dairy products and processed food in my western diet – I draw a blank. As a result, I’ve no way of telling whether I’m taking food out of someone else’s food bowl, or being a responsible consumer and living within my fair share.
True, grain footprint calculators hardly represent a comprehensive global solution. But if global food supply fails to keep pace with demand growth – forecast by the World Bank to rise by 50% by 2030 – then they’re not a bad place to start the discussion.
