CLIMATE CHANGE FUNDS AND DEVELOPMENT
could be structured in a ‘wiki-style’ format, with open access to enable interested and informed actors to validate the information provided on the funding streams. The role of civil society and independent experts in monitoring funds through a system of crosschecking would enhance the system by reducing opportunities for corruption, including the diversion of funds to other sectors.21
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With clear criteria, tracking systems, coherent reporting and independent oversight, donors’ compliance with funding commitments, particularly their pledges that are additional to development aid, will be easier to identify. In the event that compliance mechanisms are put in place to ensure that donors live up to their commitments, access to information and transparency will be crucial to monitoring this compliance.
Conclusions
A centralized global register that can track all funds – climate and development alike – and tag them for both their development and adaptation benefits would enable better coordination of activities, reduce duplication and fund fragmentation, and enhance transparency. This calls for the emerging system to go beyond the boundaries of traditional climate financing: • Beyond declarations. Given the long history of unfulfilled commitments on climate financing, donor countries must be held accountable. The current sense of impunity that prevails in the climate regime, whereby commitments are declaratory rather than a legal obligation, needs to be turned on its head.22 • Beyond additionality. Ensuring that adaptation funding is ‘new and additional’ is fundamental, but it is clear that the scale of the adaptation challenge is greater than anything that can be addressed by specific adaptation funds alone. Effective adaptation
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financing will require the notion of simple additionality to give way to a more nuanced concept of complementarity: adaptation funds must be utilized in ways that ensure that developing countries’ adaptation goals are met without compromising their development priorities. • Beyond the UNFCCC. Although climate institutions, principally the UNFCCC, will inevitably be one of the main channels through which adaptation resources will flow, they are unlikely to be – and should not be – the only channels for such funds. Additional capacity will be needed in both development and climate change institutions, so that needs are met transparently and effectively in both domains. • Beyond carbon. Adaptation benefits cannot be measured with the same currencies that are used for mitigation: money and carbon. It is necessary, therefore, to develop a currency with which to measure and account for adaptation actions and ensure that funds are being spent effectively.
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