Forum for Funders on Climate Change and International Development

Event  Forum for Funders on Climate Change and International Development
Date 9-11 February
Venue Wilton Park, Sussex, UK

It is a common perception that foundations and NGOs spend an inordinate amount of time not very productively in conferences and seminars and roundtables. The Forum for Funders on Climate Change and International Development held at Wilton Park in the UK on 9-11 February suggests that, in the area of climate change at least, they are not spending enough time talking, despite a general consensus that this is the biggest and most important thing on our collective agenda.

So what are the gaps? Why do we need more talking? Why don’t we just get on with the job, given the urgency? What struck me more than anything at the Forum was the need to bring knowledge together and for different groups to come to a shared understanding of what’s needed.

While the development people focus mainly on adaptation, emphasizing poverty and inequity and the fact that it is poor people who are already being most severely affected by climate change, the climate people focus on mitigation and the need to prevent a looming global catastrophe. Yet even the relationship between adaptation and development is not clearly understood: in large part, it was suggested, adaptation is good development, but the technology and design of development projects need to be rethought. One speaker suggested that we make too much of vocabulary: what India and other developing countries need is vast building of infrastructure and it needs to be climate resilient.

As was stressed in the summing up of the discussions of an impromptu working group that formed itself during the Forum, there are four key areas that funders and development people should be thinking about on the road to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December 2009: adaptation, mitigation, finance and technology transfer. And we can’t pick and choose: all of these are vital. In the end, as one speaker succinctly put it, ‘the whole deal must be both good enough and fair enough.’

Yet in key countries like India, climate change is barely on the political or public agenda. India, with its population of 1.1 billion and its 7,000 kilometres of unprotected coastline, is acutely vulnerable to climate change. Civil society has a crucial role to play in making the case for addressing the issue with urgency, but there is no one place where knowledge about climate change and how to address it is brought together, which could act as a resource for campaigners and implementers alike. In addition, funders are uncoordinated. One speaker made a plea to the donor community to try to build an analysis of what is being funded in India.

While there was a sense of urgency and a feeling of people being galvanized, galvanized to do what? There still seems to be so much to hammer out. The ‘McKinsey curve’ provides a cost curve for greenhouse gas reduction, showing the cost of reducing carbon emissions from different sources: while some changes would cost money, others would save money. What it doesn’t show is what is politically possible and what isn’t.

How can political will be created in the absence of a powerful social movement, it was asked. Since the financial crisis, the challenge is even greater, with mainstream political thinkers still believing that carbon reduction is the way to wreck the economy. Finance ministers need to be convinced that green change is a good way to restructure economies.

Hence the need for advocacy and policy development, the need to strengthen civil society, and the need to build knowledge and networking – all of which are areas that private funders are well placed to support.

Civil society has a potential role to play in changing attitudes, as several speakers pointed out. At the grassroots level, philanthropy can help support social movements to respond to opportunities when they present themselves. Money for documentation and sharing of experiences is also needed if grassroots experiences are to be channelled into policy work. Civil society also has a key role to play in helping communities adapt to climate change – a role that is currently being ignored by international adaptation funds.

But, as other speakers pointed out, there is also a world of international policy-making and international governance, and funders need to ensure that equity and justice are not forgotten in these forums, where communities are not well represented. The question then arose: is there a more robust way to do this than ‘putting a megaphone on the anecdotal’? Small grants can again play a part by enabling community representatives and environmental activists to participate in global meetings.

Supporting technology innovation is another area where private funders can play a role, the public sector being reluctant to invest where they see a high risk of failure. The public sector will never be able to match the appetite for risk that private funders have, one speaker suggested (unfortunately this much-touted appetite for risk is rarely exhibited in practice). Venture capital could be especially useful in low-income countries which won’t get finance from the carbon markets. Although examples of highly scalable renewable energy projects were described, one to provide solar power to 1 million homes in Bangladesh and another to replace kerosene lamps with solar lamps in Africa, valuable discussions of the role of the private sector versus the non-profit sector in such developments were only hinted at.

More generally, there clearly needs to be greater coordination, and greater clarity about roles, both among private and public funders and within the private financing world.

Sadly, the Wilton Park Forum did not really provide the sort of structured dialogue that is needed. The notes at the top of the programme suggested an ambitious agenda: ‘to bring together foundations and other funders with governments, international agencies and NGOs to discuss and develop cooperation and practical strategies on how private funding can best be harnessed to meet the serious and urgent challenges of climate change on international development’ but this clear focus was often not evident in the sessions and the discussion. Sometimes it was not clear whether the function of the conference was to help develop a better understanding of issues like migration and urbanization, to identify the best niches for private funders in the climate field, or to allow speakers to ‘pitch’ particular approaches to the assembled group of funders.

Meeting while Rome burns sounds bad, but failing to meet is worse still! Between now and Copenhagen, we can only hope to see increasing numbers of more structured meetings reflecting the urgency of the situation and the need for an ambitious post-Kyoto climate agreement.

For more information
To download Forum presentations, go to www.wiltonpark.org.uk/highlights/viewstory.aspx?url=/wp_128793586512611250.html