Debattartikel
European Development Days 17 november 2008
Gunilla Carlsson, Biståndsminister

Tal av Gunilla Carlsson vid Europaparlamentet om klimatförändring

Ladies and gentlemen,

Last year, the European Development Days focused on the implications of climate change for cooperation between the EU and its developing country partners. Since then, the climate change agenda has continued to develop rapidly. Furthermore, we have seen multiple global crises hit hard, the food crisis and the ongoing financial crisis being the two most serious ones. The challenge of climate change should be seen in this context and be dealt with as a global issue in need of as urgent a global response as the other crises facing us.

Climate change is a global issue and its discourse has emerged with a top-down perspective. Phenomena influencing the climate and their impacts have been defined by climatologists and meteorologists, using concepts from the natural sciences. The UN Convention on Climate Change was born as one of the Rio triplets in 1992. The strength of the Convention is that nearly all the countries of the world are parties to it, though mainly represented by environment ministers. Climate change has thus been framed from the beginning as an environmental issue.
As the reality of climate change has become increasingly apparent, and its extremely serious impacts have become clearer, new dimensions beyond the purely environmental have entered the scene, while the political stakes have been raised. Impacts are cutting across sectors and are context-specific. Though climate change impacts may be huge, they are essentially local in the way they affect families, neighbourhoods and villages. Thus, there is a human dimension to climate change that calls for a different approach to adaptation - a need to turn it upside down and start at the local level.

Given this background to the issue at hand, I will focus my intervention on the work of the international Commission on Climate Change and Development, which I have the honour of chairing. This Commission is addressing climate change adaptation and its links with disaster risk reduction. We have been discussing three main issues:
- how the resilience of vulnerable communities and countries can be strengthened,
- how an appropriate institutional and financial architecture for adaptation can be established, and
- how new financial resources can be mobilised.
The Commission's final results will be presented in the spring of 2009, ahead of the COP in Copenhagen where the world will try and agree on a new global framework on climate change. Our work is intended as input to discussions between donor and partner countries on how to integrate adaptation to climate change into development efforts and thereby improve global policy.

One outcome for Swedish policy of the discussions and ideas that I have participated in within the context of the Commission's work is a climate package that forms part of the recent Swedish budget. It includes a considerable increase in ODA allocations for adaptation and a special recognition of NAPAs, of disaster risk reduction and risk transfer. The package is for more than 410 million euros over three years.

Allow me to tell you about the latest meeting of the Commission on Climate Change and Development, held in Mali at the end of last month. In Mali, we continued our discussions on our main topics and had the opportunity to learn more about how Mali is coping with the challenge of climate change adaptation and risk reduction. I and the other commissioners discussed these issues with the national and local authorities, both in the capital Bamako and the rural village of Bougoula. From our work in Mali, three lessons can be drawn about the local level and its institutions.

I believe that people at local level are already adapting to a changing climate and managing risks. In Bougoula, for instance, the women's cooperative that we visited had decided to end the cutting down of trees for household energy use. They saw what deforestation was doing to their environment and that reforestation was slower due to the lack of water. The wood they needed, they collected from dead trees. A successful local decision, though without access to institutions and financing.

The decentralisation process generates opportunities. The local level is enhanced with powers to make decisions closer to the people affected. One difficulty, though, is that the necessary corresponding decentralisation of funding lags behind.

Thus, lesson number one is the need for financing (mobilisation, transfer, allocation and disbursement).

While mitigation success is measurable in parts-per-million, progress in adaptation is harder to measure, requires much more cooperation among institutions in different fields and needs more attention. Furthermore, knowledge of the local impacts of climate change still largely takes the form of hypotheses and scenarios.

Lesson number two is a need for further knowledge and information management and dissemination.

The turnout at elections in Mali showed us the lack of trust between people at the local level and the central authorities. At municipality level there is an 80 per cent voting rate, while only about 25 per cent vote in the presidential and 35 per cent in the parliamentary elections.

To effectively manage climate change adaptation, there is a need for institutions with clear functions and purposes as well as a distinction between levels (local, national, global). A combination and coordination of development and poverty reduction activities and Rio Convention institutions and efforts (including NAPAs) should be sought for.

Lesson number three is policy and strategy formulation, including roles and responsibilities of national and local government and cross-sectoral coherence. Representative and accountable governance is key. In this regard, there is a need to highlight the importance of local institutions, including local government, community organisations and the role of cities.

Adaptation must be global, regional, national and local. People's ability to adapt depends on the effectiveness of interfaces between mediating institutions at different levels, making functioning links between the local, national, regional and global levels critical.

Ladies and gentlemen,

Climate change impacts will fundamentally change development contexts and costs. Future development is about living with climate change. Thus, climate change is one of the overarching priorities for the Swedish Presidency of the EU in the second half of 2009.

I will strive to ensure that the final results from the Commission on Climate Change and Development include clear and concrete - perhaps even radical - recommendations on how to tackle climate change and development. It is my ambition that the Commission's results will be integrated in our presidency programme and then translated into EU policy together with the other Member States and the EU Commission. This will create a great opportunity to provide constructive input for a post-Kyoto deal in Copenhagen and beyond.

The long-term perspective is important. The COP in Copenhagen is just the beginning. Climate change impacts are still very uncertain, and adaptation is about short-term action and long-term vision. Most importantly, while addressing these difficult and sometimes highly technical issues we must not lose sight of the fact that this is all about our responsibility towards our children and towards the generations to come. Maintaining this perspective is even more crucial now, when the world is going through other immediate crises.

Let me conclude by coming back to where I started from: the global financial crisis we are now experiencing. I think the way it is being handled has something to tell us. It is a serious crisis, affecting all countries, slowing economic growth. In the EU, states have agreed on far-reaching measures that will stabilise the situation, while protecting those with savings in the banks, as well as taxpayers. We have agreed on rules and regulations for the financial markets, funds are being mobilised and there is a discussion about reforming the Bretton Woods institutions. I aim for the same kind of resolve to deal with the challenges of climate change. The handling of the financial crisis shows what can be done.

Thank you.