Rich countries in Copenhagen this week are trying to reduce aid to the developing world. Having made a series of promises on development aid, they now want to count the same money towards their climate commitments. There is serious concern that out donor country governments are trying to ‘rob Peter, to pay Paul’ while trying to present themselves as doing the right thing.
It is crucial for a deal to be signed in Copenhagen to scale up the money designed to help poor countries cope with climate change. However these resources should be additional to the money that has already been promised and allocated for poverty reduction. Right now, donors are planning to both re-label and re-direct the small amounts of aid money, and count this as toward delivering on our 0.7% development aid commitments. This is a problem created by rich countries and the poorest countries in the world really should not be paying for it.
There appears to be a real risk that donor countries will get away with this accounting slight of hand in Copenhagen, unless a transparency measure is included in a climate financing deal. The poverty advocacy group ONE has launched a last ditch attempt to stop aid money being ‘double counted’. Their petition will be handed to the Danish host of the conference next week and asks:
1. That existing aid promises are kept.
2. That additional costs borne by people living in poverty caused by climate change are paid for by additional money.
3. That countries are transparent about how much development aid is being reallocated to fighting climate change.
Being transparent in practice or course requires a mechanism to do it, just like publishing expense requires some rules and a system of collection and publication. Resources need to be consistently tracked and accurately labelled, other wise we simply will not be able to tell how much is new money and how much is just recycling Fortunately for the leaders in Norway, an international mechanism for achieving better transparency in aid is just being built. There is no reason why climate finance should not just be incorporated into that process. What the International Aid Transprarency Initiative offers is a common language.
This rather quiet potential revolution would enable us to compare what different donors and recipients are doing as they make decision and spend money. Beyond the challenge of double counting of climate money, this common language is a pre-requisite for getting the most out of these climate-focused resources. If you don’t know what others are doing, it ultimately impossible to make sure you money is adding value and not duplicating other efforts.
As the Global Campaign for aid transparency, Publish What You Fund is working to achieve a significant increase in the availability and accessibility of timely, comparable and comprehensive information on resources flowing into developing countries. These standards are just as applicable to climate financing. This basic information about development aid is an essential pre-requisite for accountability, public participation and effectiveness of these resources.
In Copenhagen, donors could simply agree to bring climate aid into the International Aid Transparency Initiative, thus removing the opportunity for recycling the money, as well as laying a basic foundation to ensure this precious additional resource is being used efficiently.