A famine in Somalia is almost inevitable.
Martin Griffiths, the UN’s undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, has questioned why billions of dollars pledged to tackle the climate crisis have not been used to fight famine in Somalia. Griffiths said he did not know where the promised $100bn (£87bn) a year to fight the impact of global heating in poorer countries had gone.
“The truth of the matter is that we are scrambling to try to understand where the climate money is that was promised a decade ago. Where is it? Who’s holding it and who is not delivering it to places like Somalia?” said Griffiths. "...We haven’t even managed to get to them the money that we pledged nobly some time ago for exactly this kind of purpose.”
Griffiths said he had “failed” to receive an answer when he asked governments how climate financing was decided and delivered. Griffiths said climate funding could have been used to dig wells and support livelihoods in the worst-affected areas of Somalia.
Somalia’s presidential envoy for drought response, Abdirahman Abdishakur Warsame, pointed out that the international community was failing Somalia. “Millions of children are malnourished, many will die, and we don’t have one penny of that climate fund,”
At the UN climate change conference in 2009, rich countries pledged to give low-income states $100bn a year by 2020 to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. The Green Climate Fund was created as a way to deliver the money but has had limited impact because rich countries often channel their financing through the World Bank or regional development banks. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which monitors donor contributions to climate financing, low-income countries received 8% of the money between 2016 and 2020.
Prof Lee White, Gabon’s environment and climate change minister, said the system was flawed. Donor countries self-report contributions and there is no clear way to trace how much money has been donated and where it has been spent, he said and explaining only a fraction of the money that rich countries say they have provided reaches the Green Climate Fund and even then applications for money come with overcomplicated criteria. He added, "...it often feels the system is designed to prevent you spending the funds on anything other than developed-nation consultants.”
Kevin Watkins, a former executive director of the Overseas Development Institute, said climate and development aid needed to be integrated, “We have a development finance system... which is somewhat competitive, with big agencies scrambling for the same pot of money, which is badly coordinated, and which, in all honesty, is failing to address the real climate risk challenges for countries at the sharp end of the crisis.”
He said Somalia was an example of low-income countries being forced to rely on humanitarian aid when they had already entered a state of crisis instead of having earlier interventions that could have solved root problems.
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