Climate aid to poor countries: how is the Netherlands doing?
In are at the United Nations in New York Prime Minister Mark Rutte praised Dutch climate aid in September. “We provide expertise and financial support to protect vulnerable areas from the elements,” he said. “We have our total climate funding and support Secretary-General Guterres’s call to achieve ten at least half of adaptation. In fact, the Netherlands has spent almost 70 percent of its public climate funding on adaptation in recent years.”
Is the Netherlands really doing as well as Rutte identity? To answer that question, it is good to go back to December 2009, to the climate summit in Copenhagen. die in chaos, not only because of an approaching blizzard that forced government leaders to leave in a hurry, but mainly because they couldn’t agree on anything. Except for one thing: countries pledged 100 billion dollars (about 86 billion euros) annually from 2020 for climate policy proposals in poor countries.
100 billion dollars
Everyone thought it was a matter of justice. Industrialized countries owe their prosperity to a century and a half on extensive use of fossil fuels. they encompass the world saddled with an enshrined dangerous form. Poor countries are being hit hard – and because they are more vulnerable and regions sensitive to climate change, much more severely than the rich ones – and will never be able to benefit from cheap fossil energy with the same ease.
Making the 100 billion developing countries less vulnerable to the consequences of climate change (adaptation) and helping to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions (mitigation). The amount came more or less out of the blue, but the signal was clear: it would be ‘a lot of money’. No one in Copenhagen worried about how the amount would be scraped together. The spatial still more than ten years before that.
It is now 2021 and the 100 billion has not been reached. The OECD, the organization of industrialized countries, does not get more than 80 billion dollars. At the request of the British government, which hosted the climate summit in Glasgow last Sunday, Canada and Germany started one last time. But just before the summit they recognize that their mission has failed. 100 billion will be reached in 2023 at the earliest. The good news, they wrote in their final report, was that a lot more money may become available after that.
Back to Rutte’s speech at the UN. Is it right, what does he say? international contributes to climate finance? How much of it is earmarked for adaptation? How does the Netherlands compare to other European countries? Does the Netherlands pay a fair share of the 100 billion, how do you determine what is fair?
These are questions that the House of Representatives also asked itself last year. The House Committee on Foreign Trade and Development Cooperation (BHOS), which deals with climate money, allowed the cooperation. Herman Vollebergh, economist and professor at Tilburg University, and two colleagues delved into figures kept by the OECD, the club of industrialized countries, to look at countries fulfilling the Copenhagen promise. Vollenbergh compared the Dutch figures with those of other countries. Their revenues include spent together in the previous expenses report Achieving climate finance in selected EU countries.
In a video conversation with Vollebergh it became clear from the first question how great the lack of clarity is. The question is simple: does it meet its obligations when it comes to international climate finance?
There is a long silence, and then Vollebergh says: “Well, I don’t know.”
The answer turned out not to be easy. It is not about an amount that the Netherlands pays annually into an international climate fund managed by the UN, from which poor countries can draw as they see fit. such a kind Green Climate Fund does exist, but like most countries, the Netherlands prefers to keep climate money under its own management. It is distributed through an organization, funding, donations to aid organizations, the Financing for Provisions Countries (FMO) and multilateral banks such as the World Bank. In the report, Vollebergh and his colleagues write that “the definition of climate finance has become a political issue rather than a purely technical one”. This is one of the reasons why it is difficult to compare countries.
New and additional
According to Vollebergh, a mixed picture emerges from the OECD figures. For example, it has been internationally agreed that climate money must be ‘new and complementary’, in order to prevent existing development aid from being renamed climate aid. Developing countries would then get a cigar of their own, which could be at the expense of education projects or money for medical care.
Like many other countries, the Netherlands does not take this requirement very seriously. By definition, the Dutch government considers climate finance new and additional, because the budget is used new every year. A strange reasoning, says Vollebergh. “It is clear that by additional is meant something completely different. It should be something that does extra, an ordinary citizen will tell you. The Netherlands is therefore not held in high regard internationally.”
The Rutte I cabinet, in which VVD and CDA ruled with the support of the PVV, transferred climate financing to development cooperation. the budget for development aid was reduced. Developing countries therefore not only received a cigar from the Netherlands in their own words, the cigar also became smaller.
Public and private money
A second point of discussion about climate aid is that money should mainly come from public funds, for example through subsidies. That’s what developing countries think. Rich countries often think very differently about this. These also count for private money: come and investments by companies, which are realized with a little government assistance. Poor countries have fundamental conditions that are imposed on that private money.
Vollebergh, the OECD figures show that more than half of all Dutch climate money comes from private parties. That is, certainly with other countries, so much that Vollebergh and his colleagues have doubts about the figures. also the Court of Auditors seems to do that. He writes in his ‘Accountability Survey 2019’: “The minister for BHOS now only gives figures about the mobilized private financing, and not about the public financing that has started it.” Public money for climate aid could account for a larger share of the total money than official figures show.
“Countries all have their own culture in the field of development cooperation,” says Vollebergh. “The past apparently in the Dutch political relationships of the moment to put the money on mobilizing a lot of private. The Netherlands would like to show that. And then it is important to make the private part of the climate money as extensive as possible.” In Sweden, for example, the situation is very different, says Vollebergh. There it is seen as a sign of political decency to pay for development aid with public money.
There are drawbacks to the preference for private climate aid, according to Vollebergh. “It misses the risks that should go. That you spoil the private sector instead of them really making new investments.” In other words: that companies that already wanted to invest in poor countries can now finance it more cheaply with government aid. While government aid should really trigger new investments that would otherwise not have been made, for example in clean energy.
Adaptation and mitigation
Poor countries prefer to use the money to adapt to the effects of climate change. These are concrete projects that mainly benefit the local population. Rich countries give money to spend on greenhouse gas emissions. Less greenhouse gases is good for the whole world, including the donor country itself. Internationally agreed climate finance fifty fifty to be divided between the two. But that is not realized. The rich countries get their way and the vast majority of the money (almost three quarters) goes to reducing greenhouse gases.
The Netherlands seems to be an exception, as Rutte’s speech shows. Germany and Sweden are the same, according to Vollebergh. The Netherlands insists on the need to hammer money into adaptation. As a low-lying delta, it has excellent knowledge to increase the resilience of countries. self-interest also comes into play. Would the Netherlands therefore also have the companies to capitalize on that knowledge.
According to Rutte, 70 percent of public climate money goes to adaptation. The addition of ‘public’ is important and puts the meaning into perspective, as more than half of the money in the Netherlands is not public. Vollebergh has not been able to figure out the percentage of Rutte is based. Because according to international data on the Netherlands, only 32 percent goes to adaptation. In addition, 55 percent goes to cross cutprojects, which benefit ten from both adaptation and mitigation – perhaps a large part of them is considered adaptation.
Foreign Affairs refers to figures on request a recent evaluation which is a directorate of this ministry. It concludes without further substantiation that 69 percent of public climate finance goes to adaptation. This concerns bilateral aid from the Netherlands to specific countries, the ministry said. Aid via multilateral institutions such as the World Bank is not included in this percentage. At least half of the total will go to adaptation, according to the ministry.
The officials find in the evaluation that it is easy. “Currently, it is difficult to extract data on climate finance from the various information systems of the ministry,” they write. The ministry could set up a ‘more transparent and comprehensive database for Dutch climate finance’.
a fair share
Despite his caveats, Vollebergh is not only negative about the Netherlands’ climate aid. It does contribute to international climate aid indeed. “When it comes to spending public money, the Netherlands places the emphasis on adaptation and the poorest countries. This is a good business.”
ultimately meets its own obligations, concludes Vollebergh. “The amount of 25 billion euros, which is the Netherlands 1, as a fair share of the 100 billion dollars that the rich countries have pledged, will be achieved.”
There is, however, another caveat, according to Vollebergh. “This amount is much lower than what the developing countries, and many with them, take as a fair share.” For example, development organization OxfamNovib believes that the Netherlands should contribute 2 percent of that 100 billion dollars. That is more than 1.7 billion euros. Actually, it should be even more, development organizations, because that 100 billion dollars from 2009 never started for development organizations.
The real question, of course, is whether money is well spent, countries are helped to accommodate passengers and emit less greenhouse gases. “In the end, contact is not about: how much money do you put in, but: where does it go?”, says Vollebergh. And the answer to that question is even more difficult, he says. “It is difficult to get a good picture of the destination of all Dutch money.”
Moreover, you should also take a good look at ordinary development funding, says Vollebergh. If therefore coal-fired power stations are still carried, that is of course a tragedy. “You can direct development aid to fossil energy with one hand and climate finance with the other to combat the consequences.”
There is only one option in Glasgow: embrace the enemy page 15
A version of this article also in NRC in the morning of November 5, 2021