Adapting to Climate Change – Major Funding Proposals Examined

Timmons J. Roberts gives a useful primer on climate justice in his article The International Dimension of Climate Justice and the Need for International Adaptation Funding.  He explores the basic dynamic of unequal impacts from climate change, and identifies the key mechanisms for ensuring “reliable, adequate, and appropriate funding to help poor nations adapt to the worst elements of climate change.”

GDRs comes into the story by way of a typology of major adaptation funding proposals, and it is useful to have an overview of the key proposals to date.  Note that Timmons doesn’t compare the merits of each proposal, but at least he lays the groundwork for future inquiry.

This report, called Sharing the Burden of Adaptation Financing: An Assessment of the Contributions of Countries, builds further on Timmons review (and authored by a group of Dutch professors, where adaptation research seems to be taking off at the Freie University in Amsterdam).  A sustainability research institution based in Italy, the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, commissioned the report.

The authors conduct a very in-depth and thoughtful analysis of adaptation proposals.  In total, seven adaptation proposals are discussed as well as the ethical and policy dimension of each. They’re obviously correct that their proposal, indeed, renders “a highly complex set of choices for policymakers.”  While this analysis gets into the finer nuance of adaptation policy, it is a useful read in that the paper helps the reader understand the real trade-offs of various adaptation models, trade-offs that are otherwise often implicit in the climate change debate.

In particular, we welcome this report as part of the growing body of research that aims to clearly operationalize the principle of common but differential responsibility.