In the countryside in Malawi, farmer Doma Alie stands in his field on a kind of step machine. He pumps up groundwater by making stepping movements. After a few hours of scootering, he is exhausted. He’s getting older one day, but he’s still grateful for his pump. Because without it he wouldn’t make it.
He used to be able to rely on the rain, he says. But that is in the past. “Then it’s too wet again and the seeds or young plants wash away, then too dry again and the crops die.” In recent years, his family has experienced hunger. “The irrigation pump put an end to that. Fortunately, we have groundwater here and can now also grow enough in drier periods.”
One of the key topics for poorer countries at the Glasgow Climate Summit is just that: more money is needed to respond to climate change, so-called adaptation. This includes, for example, irrigation, but also seeds that can withstand high temperatures better, or houses that can withstand a hurricane.
Few emissions, many consequences
Poor countries contribute little to climate change, Africa is estimated to be only responsible for 4 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. But African countries are a big victim. Such as Malawi, a country that has experienced seven droughts and 19 floods in the past half century.
Twelve years ago at the climate summit in Copenhagen it was agreed to make an amount of 100 billion dollars a year available from 2020 for adaptation and ‘mitigation’, the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, for example through sustainable energy. Topic of discussion in Glasgow: that amount has never been achieved and too much has been spent on mitigation (reducing emissions) and not enough on adaptation, responding to a changing climate.
“But adaptation is actually crucial for people to make themselves resilient,” says Professor Sosten Chiotha from Malawi, who is now also in Glasgow. “People want to take care of themselves, but they can’t always do that.” We don’t want to beg, he emphasizes, but we do need the means to save ourselves.
‘Climate money mainly goes to large organizations’
Chiotha is a respected climate scientist in Malawi. It was his organization Lead that brought the community of farmer Moda Alie a number of irrigation pumps. But they were not of the best quality. Three are already broken, the handle of the fourth is loose. “That’s what we could afford.”
His organization would like money to set up a better irrigation system, in which electricity is generated with solar energy that is used to pump up the water: mitigation and adaptation in one fell swoop. Three years ago he applied for accreditation from the Green Climate Fund, which manages a large part of the climate money, but he has not yet received it. “The climate money mainly goes to large international organizations such as various branches of the United Nations and the World Bank. It is difficult to intervene as a smaller local player.”
This is confirmed by Daan Robben and Annelieke Douma of Both ENDS, an organization that advocates that local, small-scale social organizations can turn to for funding. “The figures show that less than 10 percent of climate finance goes to the local level. There are a lot of organizations queuing up, but the majority goes to large institutions while local organizations have valuable networks and knowledge.”
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