Picture by {link:http://www.grameen-info.org/index.php?option=com_zoom&Itemid=103}Grameen Bank Photo Gallery{/link}
It is going to be more and more imperative that countries around the world and people everywhere (nobody is excluded from this) will need to learn to cope with the impacts of climate change. What is really needed is money to help strengthen the capacity and the ability of poorer people with lower livelihoods through education and intermediate levels of technology to strengthen their livelihoods and their economy. “We should be able to help strengthen the capacity and the ability of poorer people with lower livelihoods” Prof. Ian Burton says. Micro insurance would help people in the period of risk and it could be provided in a manner which would encourage people to take adaptive actions. “It is an idea both of spreading risks and of helping to promote the idea of adaptation” Prof. Burton explains.
Watch at the video interview with Ian Burton at the International Workshop The Social Dimension of Adaptation to Climate Change in Venice
After Copenhagen: Adaptation and International Negotiations
In the last five years or more the profile of adaptation in the negotiations has become more and more important. People are realising that the issue of controlling the emissions of greenhouse gases is going to be very difficult and it is going to take a long time for political, economic, and technical reasons
Read the full transcript
I firstly think that the discussions and negotiations on adaptation are going very well compared to the discussions of mitigation on greenhouse gases, which are stalled in a very difficult place. In the last five years or more, the profile of adaptation in the negotiations has become more and more important. I think one reason for that is that the people, the negotiators, and the countries are realising that the issue of controlling the emissions of greenhouse gases is going to be very difficult and it is going to take a long time for political, economic, and technical reasons. Therefore it is going to be more and more imperative that countries around the world and people everywhere (nobody is excluded from this) will need to learn to cope with the impacts of climate change. I think this was very well reflected in the Copenhagen negotiations, although no specific conclusions were reached at that time.
Risks and Dangers for Adaptation Investments
What is really needed is money to help strengthen the capacity and the ability of poorer people with lower livelihoods through education and intermediate levels of technology to strengthen their livelihoods and their economy. But the large amount of money that the Copenhagen Accord promises for poorest countries could become lumpy investment if handled by large institutions only for large projects
Read the full transcript
One of the things that was said at Copenhagen is that the Copenhagen Accord (the political agreement, not the binding agreement that we had hoped would emerge) made a promise on behalf of the rich donor nations that there would be somewhere around 20 to 30 billion dollars a year made available for adaptation within the next 2 or 3 years, rising by 2020, to a hundred billion dollars a year. This is almost the equivalent of all the amount of foreign aid that is given today. A huge amount of money was promised to help especially the poorer developing countries and the small island states adapt to climate change. You can be sceptical about that. If that order of money came about it would be extraordinarily difficult to manage it in an effective way. In consequence, it would probably be handled to very large institutions that are used to handling large sums of money like the World Bank, for example. Typically they spend their money on large investments. I think that the danger of giving a large amount of money that is suggested for the purposes of adaptation in very poor countries at the moment, is that a lot of that adaptation will be going to very large engineering projects: seawalls, big dams for irrigation, and so on. What is really needed is money to help strengthen the capacity and the ability of poorer people with lower livelihoods through education and intermediate levels of technology to strengthen their livelihoods and their economy. I’m afraid that large amounts of money would then go because it is more efficient to manage large amounts of money by giving it out in big chunks. That’s what I mean by lumpy investment. While we will need some of that, no doubt, I think that there is a danger that we will get altogether too much of it.
Adaptation to Climate Change: Micro Insurance and Its Opportunities
It is an idea both of spreading risks and of helping to promote the idea of adaptation.
Most of the activities of the livelihoods of poor people in poor countries are not covered by insurance. In the same way we did with microfinance, micro insurance would help people over the period of risk and it could be provide in a manner which would encourage them to take adaptive actions
Read the full transcript
What we’ve seen in the developing world in the last 20 years or so, is something called the development of microfinance. This was developed initially by the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh and has spread quite widely among developing countries. It gives very small amounts of capital, which the private capital market does not supply. It gives small amounts of capital for people to invest in small villages and domestic industries, which can strengthen people’s livelihoods, increase their capacity to adapt to climate variability in change, and gradually increase their wealth and opportunities. Now you can expand microfinance by including an insurance element at a very low level. Most of the activities of the livelihoods of poor people in poor countries are not covered by insurance. There is virtually no insurance industry in those countries and certainly not at the rural level. If you could start in the way that we did with microfinance, micro insurance would help tied people over the period of risk with the experience of drought, flood, or some other adverse climate effect. Moreover, you could provide that insurance in a manner, which would encourage them to take adaptive actions. In other words, if the micro insurance were to be provided by some form of public or private cooperation, there could be a public element that helps to provide the insurance at an affordable rate for the people until such time as their resources and their wealth has sufficiently increased to be able to afford to pay the full actual rate of the premium themselves. It is an idea both of spreading risks and of helping to promote the idea of adaptation.
