Should donors peg aid to the environment?

It was recently announced that Norway will give Liberia up to $150m (£92.1m) over the next six years to fight illegal logging. We talk to government ministers, NGOs, climate change experts and thinktanks to ask whether donors should attach environmental conditions to aid, and whether it could be a viable model for the future of development.

Tine Sundtoft, minister of climate and environment, Norwegian government @TSundtoft

We chose to work with Liberia because its large forest cover can store vast amounts of carbon. Liberia holds the majority of the remaining Upper Guinean rainforest, home to many rare animals and plant species. Through the Norwegian International Climate and Forest Initiative, we work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions linked to deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries, known as REDD+. Our objective is to reduce global warming, but the actions also help realise Norwegian development policies.

Liberia has shown great ambitions, and has come to us with bold plans for both developing its agricultural sector and protecting its forest. I think Liberia could be a great example for other countries in the region.

Alison Hoare, senior research fellow, illegal logging and forestry, Chatham House, London

I think the Norway-Liberia agreement is an interesting approach to reducing deforestation and there is a comparison to be made with efforts in Europe to reduce illegal logging. The EU has very different relationships with the countries it is working with – setting up voluntary partnership agreements to ensure that the timber coming out of the countries is legal. As part of the discussions to support countries to achieve those aims, it has made the countries look at different options.

I think the biggest flaw in attaching conditions to aid is that it makes people think about what they need to do to access that money. The fundamental problems of corruption and weakened institutions take a long time to sort, and there is also the risk that governments might find easy or more superficial ways to meet the criteria set, without looking at the deep underlying issues that need to be addressed.

Laura Frigenti, vice president of global development practice at InterAction, Washington DC

Personally, I don’t like to see conditions placed on aid. I do think implementing and choosing the right policies are an important factor to guide donors’ decisions on whether or not to give resources to a country, but I think we need to twist the connection from: “I give you the money and you do what I want you to do, and therefore you do well” to “You are doing well and I will give resources to support your good policies and programmes”.

I think it is absolutely true that to eradicate poverty you also need to address climate change, but as a donor you have the privilege of looking around for countries that are implementing policies to protect the environment, and can make an educated decision about where best to put the money. Donors should pay attention to what’s happening on the ground, to what countries are doing with their own resources and what programmes they’re running. If that is conducive to good results, we should support them.

Having up-front conditionalities and linking them to providing resources doesn’t necessarily yield the results you’re looking for, and I don’t think attaching aid to conditionalities on environment as well as other objectives is good policy dialogue.

Sven Harmeling, climate change advocacy coordinator, Care, Bonn, Germany @harmeling

The world will never tackle poverty if we fail to provide environmental sustainability and tackle climate change. The world’s poorest communities rely on their natural environments for food and shelter and to generate income. As more extreme and erratic weather events occur, these once-rich natural resources are degraded, making the world’s poorest people poorer still. By integrating strategies to help people adapt to climate change into development projects we can limit the reversal of hard-won development gains and stop people being tipped back into extreme poverty.

But in some situations tying aid to environmental objectives is not always possible. After a major typhoon or flood, aid money simply needs to get quickly to the people who need it most. Above all, we need to work towards an integrated approach to aid and environmental concerns if we are to achieve long-term poverty reduction and sustainable development for all.

Amy Dodd, chair, Concord’s AidWatch, UK

Tackling climate change – countering the impact it will have on many of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people – is a critical part of long-term, sustainable development but one where neither action, nor the money needed to finance that action, seems to be living up to what is needed or what was committed.

Donor countries, including the EU and its member states, committed to climate finance being new and additional to development aid in Copenhagen in 2009 because we all recognised that the costs of climate change are additional to global development costs. But as of last year, only two EU member states – Sweden and Denmark – are meeting that commitment. Double-counting the same money towards two different targets not only undermines countries’ credibility but, most importantly, undercuts efforts to end poverty and ensure a sustainable, equitable future for all.

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