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No to WB fund, civic groups insist as Cancun climate talks end


Philippine civil society groups on Human Rights Day joined a huge network of thousands of international groups roundly opposed to the World Bank’s creation of a multimillion-dollar climate change fund. The international groups, gathered since November 29 in Cancun, Mexico for a parallel conference to the 2010 United Nations Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC) there, also called on their governments to “hold fast to the principles of climate justice" and to reject the Bank’s plans to create a climate fund. At the 12-day climate summit, 192 countries negotiated hard to toughen existing pledges made in 1997 to cut carbon emissions. They also discussed the setting up of a global climate fund and the creation of “climate finance" bodies and mechanisms. Last year’s climate change talks in Copenhagen recognized that developing countries needed more money to reduce their global warming emissions and also to adapt to the impacts of climate change, such as the rising spread of diseases, declining crop yields and worsening natural disasters. Wealthy countries committed to mobilizing billions from a wide variety of sources to meet the medium-term needs of developing countries by 2020. They also pledged to raise "fast-start" climate funds needed to meet developing countries’ short-term needs. This year, countries focused on setting up the climate fund, creating climate finance bodies — as well as expanding carbon markets. Carbon markets, multimillion dollar climate fund Carbon markets, part of the market-based approach, aim to control global warming by giving rich countries economic incentives to reduce their polluting emissions. The Kyoto protocol, adopted by countries in the first UNFCC in 1997, charged industrialized countries to cap their global warming emissions progressively until 2012. To meet their limits, developed countries could also earn “carbon tradable offsets" by investing in clean energy projects in poor or developing countries. On Wednesday, World Bank President Robert Zoellick launched a new multimillion dollar fund meant to expand the carbon market concept by encouraging emerging market countries also set up their own carbon markets. In a statement, the Bank said that the fund, which could reach up to $100 million, will provide technical and other support to developing countries to develop their own carbon markets. The list of participating countries was still being finalized, but it is expected to include China, Mexico, Chile and Indonesia, the Bank said. Loans, not funds The Bank’s initiative, however, was roundly rejected by civil society groups gathered for the parallel climate summit. “With the Bank serving as either source or channel for climate finance means that a significant amount of these funds will flow as loans," warned Lidy Nacpil, head of the Freedom from Debt Coalition. The FDC was a convenor of the Philippine Movement for Climate Justice (PMCJ), which joined the network of international civic society groups and coalitions that rejected the Bank climate fund. The groups included the Jubilee South and Asia Pacific Movement on Debt and Development, the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance, the NGO Forum on the ADB, and the PMCJ — itself an alliance of over 100 Philippine community-based organizations of fishermen, farmers, workers, environmentalists, advocacy groups and cause-oriented alliances such as the FDC. According to Nacpil, Bank loans have historically been “debt-creating instruments." Since its creation, the Bank has granted development loans, but with strings attached: loans have come with “conditionalities" that governments are forced to meet. Over the past decades, many of these conditionalities have caused poor countries to become further underdeveloped, she explained. “Climate finance must not be given in the form of loans or other debt-creating instruments," she declared. “Millions of people are now suffering from the impacts of this crisis, when they have contributed less to it," she said, “but historically, the few wealthiest and most industrialized nations have caused the crisis," she noted. Rich countries contributed the most to climate change through colonization, rapid industrialization and the wanton exploitation of the world's resources in their colonial past, she explained. “It is already a grave injustice that peoples of the South (developing countries) bear the brunt of the impacts of (the climate change) crisis they had less part in creating," she said. “It is an even graver injustice that we will be made to pay for the cost of dealing with these impacts," she added. It’s a matter of trust Having “directly experienced the consequences of the WB’s loans, loan-financed projects and policy conditionalities, to us, it is inconceivable that this institution can be entrusted with climate finance," said Abdul Awal of SUPRO, a network of grassroots community groups in Bangladesh and a member of Jubilee South. “In Bangladesh, we waged a nationwide campaign rejecting any role for the World Bank in our national climate finance trust funds," Awal said. “The World Bank has been promoting a development paradigm that has led to the problem of global warming and climate change," said Miguel Borba de Sa of Jubilee South Americas. Worse, it has also “been promoting false solutions to the climate crisis which only paves the way for generating more profits for global elites and transnational corporations," Sa said. “The WB has spent billions of dollars financing fossil fuel projects these last 40 years," Mithika Mwenda of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance noted. According to Mwenda, “Just very recently, it financed a mega coal project in South Africa to the tune of billion dollars. Clearly it shares a major responsibility in causing the climate crisis." "Carbon markets are an irreparably flawed means of addressing climate change," said Karen Orenstein, the United States climate campaigner of the environmental group Friends of Earth. "They are unreliable and subject to fraud, and they open the door to offset loopholes that undermine environmental integrity," she said. The groups declared that they will launch “vigorous campaigns" worldwide in the next months to counter the Bank’s expanding role in climate issues. Many books published over the past 30 years have criticized the Bank, saying its lending policies actually worsened the underdevelopment of poor nations. Development Debacle: The World Bank in the Philippines, written by Filipino public intellectual and now Party-list Rep. Walden Bello, together with David Kinley and others authors, illustrated how Bank loans in the 1970s were tied to policies that actually worsened the country’s underdevelopment. Published by the Institute for Food and Development Policy in 1982, the book showed how the Bank pushed the Philippine government to take up an export-oriented development strategy that involved rural development projects, export processing zones that offered tax breaks to multinational companies. Under the strategy, the Philippines was supposed to prosper by exporting agricultural produce and products made at the export processing zones. The strategy, however, failed big time, Bello said. In another book, The World Bank: A Critical Analysis, author Cheryl Payer analyzes the Bank's role in worsening poverty, hunger and malnutrition and unemployment in the developing countries. For its part, the Bank remained steadfast over the creation of the multimillion-dollar climate change fund. "We know that the poorest countries will suffer the earliest and the most from climate change," Zoellick said. "They will bear the brunt of changing weather patterns, water shortages, and rising sea levels even though they are the least equipped to deal with them," he said. He said the climate fund will help poor countries “put in place practical, effective solutions leading to low-carbon growth."—Dani Molintas/JV, GMANews.TV

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