South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Maite Nkoana-Mashabane opening a consultation meeting preparing for next week's climate summit in Durban. Credit: Jacoline Prinsloo/COP17
It’s a massive, ambitious, program with a pledged $100 billion budget per year – seven times that of the Apollo program that sent man to the moon – but you’ve probably never heard of it. The program was one result of last November’s worldwide climate talks in Cancún, Mexico, established so developed nations can help developing countries respond to climate change. With so much money potentially at stake Simon Donner, a geographer at the University of British Columbia (UBC) wants to make sure it’s used effectively.
“Naturally, governments want the money to be spent wisely,” Donner told Simple Climate. “The problem is that the standard mechanisms by which the spending decisions are made and evaluated sometimes do a poor job of addressing waste and misappropriation.” And even though the fund won’t start running until 2020, action to put the right mechanisms in place should begin with next week’s international climate talks in Durban, South Africa. “The next few years are critical,” he asserted.
Donner has worked on climate change adaptation in the Pacific Islands, and sought to bring that together with other lessons about international aid that can be applied to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) at the centre of the $100 billion program. He’s also a fellow at UBC’s Liu Institute for Global Issues where two of his colleagues, Hisham Zerriffi and Milind Kandlikar, had similarly helped developing world responses to a changing climate. Together they called upon this experience, as well as previous reviews of the successes and failures of these kinds of programs, to gather advice relevant to theGCF. After two rounds of reviewing by fellow scientists, three main pieces of specific advice were published in top research journal Science last week.
Simple Climate 