Rio+20: Panel Discussion

Unless money that’s invested in sustainable development is better protected against waste or abuse, it won’t be enough. Rio+20 must not miss this link.

Ensuring that climate finance is an effective driver of sustainable development: What safeguards are required and what are the challenges to their uptake, implementation and enforcement?

13th June 9.30 – 11.00 am, RioCentro, T6

Climate finance could become a powerful driver of sustainable development. By supporting mitigation, adaptation and capacity building, it can help build the governmental, social, economic and physical infrastructures needed to achieve poverty reduction and green economy growth. But without concerted efforts to strengthen the governance of financing, these goals will remain elusive.

This event proposes to make the case for incorporating governance safeguards into any commitments and processes that come out of Rio+20, whilst offering concrete guidance on the form that they should take. It will bring together funders, project implementers, auditors, and civil society representatives to discuss the various successes and failures of attempts to safeguard climate finance against abuse or mismanagement.

Speakers

Lisa Elges, Climate Governance Programme Manager, Transparency International

William Ehlers, External Affairs Leader, Global Environment Facility

Rafael Lopes Torres, Secretary of the Brazilian Court of Audit

United Nations Development Programme, speaker to be confirmed

Other events by Transparency International at the conference

Making climate finance work for sustainable development in Brazil

Date and time: 16/06/2012, 2h00pm to 7h00pm
Venue: FINEP, Praia do Flamengo, nº 200, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Language: Portuguese
Participants:
Transparency International
Instituto Ethos
Amazon Fund
Article 19
Nature Conservance

Workshop for investigative journalists: understanding corruption risks in climate governance and finance

Date and time: 18/06/2012, 10h00am to 1h00pm
Venue: ESPM - Rua do Rosário, 90, Centro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Language: Portuguese
Participants:
Transparency International
ABRAJI (Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism)
ESPM (Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing)

Strengthening the governance of the Clean Development Mechanism so as to ensure sustainable development benefits

Date and time: 19/06/2012, 10h00am to 12h00am
Venue: Sala Multimídia, Museu da República, Rua do Catete 153, Catete, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Language: English
Participants:
Transparency International
CDM Watch
Centre for International Environmental Law
Gold Standard

*Please note that the events on 16th and 18th are in Portuguese only.

Event location

Address

Avenida Salvador Allende 6555
Barra da Tijuca
Rio de Janeiro
Brasil

Contact Info

Phone:: + 55 (21) 8075 8908
Email:: aharrison@transparency.org

Event outcomes

Rio+20: Making climate money work for people and the planet

Sustainable development has three basic tenets: economic growth, poverty alleviation and environmental protection. It’s about ensuring that we all have enough food and jobs, and that our health and prosperity doesn’t come at the expense of our environment. Climate finance could set us on a good course to achieving these goals. But not unless we first invest in systems to ensure that money is spent honestly and effectively.

This is the message that we took to Rio+20, otherwise known as the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development. Our panel discussion, ‘Ensuring that climate finance is an effective driver of sustainable development’ posed the questions: what safeguards are needed to protect climate finance against waste and corrupt abuse, and how well do they work in practice?

Lisa Elges, head of climate governance at Transparency International, spoke of what we call the accountability deficit in climate finance.

“There’s a lot of complexity and a lot of unclarity about who is responsible for taking decisions, who is going to be held accountable for decisions on how money should be spent and how can that oversight be monitored and measured over a longer period of time. Transparency and accountability is key to making sure that climate finance works.”

When people in charge of money are allowed to hide behind anonymity we run the risk that that money might end up in the wrong place. Shining a light on budgets and decision-making is a first step to combatting corruption. A second step is to involve members of the public in watching over these processes to check that they’re sound. At Transparency International we’re working in nine countries to ensure that this happens. As Lisa Elges put it,

“We are trying to build capacity in civil society so that people can start having a conversation about what climate governance is about and that will then empower them to start monitoring climate finance in their countries.”

So what do the funders think? The Global Environment Facility is an independent financial institution that provides grants to developing countries for environmental projects. It is a major conduit of climate finance. Team Leader for External Affairs, William Ehlers, talked about the anti-corruption standards that the facility requires of itself and the agencies that carry out its projects on the ground. These include core principles of independence, transparency, monitoring and response, all of which are applied to climate finance transactions.

“In order to ensure, or to try to ensure anyway, that it is used properly, without waste, without corruption and that it achieves its objectives and that If there are problems along the way that it can identify and address them and if somebody is not acting correctly that there are avenues for people to come forward and show it up so it can be addressed.”

One of the challenges that countries receiving climate finance face, however, is that funders all set their own conditions on spending. Ehlers hoped that the Rio+20 conference would advance discussions over how best to coordinate funding streams and requirements. Says Ehlers,

“Each one of them have their own mechanisms, their own processes and the countries which are supposed to be the beneficiaries, in general, developing countries find it increasingly difficult to access those funds in a coherent way because they have to live up to different conditions for each one so very soon they’ll need national experts who know what the funds are and how to put them together and that really is very inefficient. Of course, no one institution can do absolutely everything, but at least we should have some sort of coordination among those funds so that each one knows exactly how its role matches with the roles of the others. And none of that is happening, so one good outcome could be that a process is put in place to actually find how to coordinate all these fund., That, I think, would be one good contribution to the system.”

Brazil, which hosted Rio+20, has spent over US$240 million dollars in climate finance. To ensure that climate money is put to good use, Rafael Lopes Torres, Secretary of the Brazilian Court of Audit (Tribunal de Contas da União), stressed the importance of strong and systematic performance audits on transfers from the federal government to states, municipalities and companies.

“It’s very common here in Brazil that the federal government transfers the money and they forget what has been done. And years after they are going to try to see what the result of the project is and so in many cases if there are problems with the execution, if you follow up during the execution there are more chances to reverse any problems that happen. But if you just transfer the money and see at the end what has been done the chances of failure is much bigger.”

Increased transparency, clear and enforced chains of accountability, and independent oversight – these are some of the positive steps that can be taken to address corruption risks in climate finance proactively. Climate finance spending is set to vastly increase in the coming years. So luckily we are still ahead of the game.

Event overview