Distributing scarce adaptation finance across SIDS: effectiveness, not efficiency

Abstract

Although Small Island Developing States (SIDS) receive high amounts of adaptation finance on a per capita basis, current and expected funding is much lower than present and future adaptation costs. Since funding is insufficient to cover all needs, adaptation finance ought to benefit those who are most entitled to the funding. These entitlements can be determined via prioritisation criteria. Vulnerability is the most prominent prioritisation criterion but must be supplemented with further criteria because of its shortcomings. In this contribution we thus investigate whether cost-effectiveness and democracy should play this role. To this end, we first discuss Stadelmann and colleagues' proposal to operationalise the costeffectiveness criterion via three indicators (absolute economic savings, relative economic savings, and avoided loss of Disability Adjusted Life Years). We argue that this set of indicators fails to capture important adaptation benefits and may reinforce the current bias towards hard adaptation measures. We further claim that one should 'just' focus on safeguarding effective, that is successful, adaptation instead. To that effect, we propose 'democracy' as an alternative to costeffectiveness. We first justify the criterion by providing intrinsic and instrumental reasons in its defence and, second, discuss how to operationalise it, using the example of SIDS. We conclude that although also challenging, democracy is less difficult to operationalise than cost-effectiveness.

Ecological cosmopolitan citizenship

“…The first major inequality is the one mentioned in the quote from the IPCC report: the effects of climate change, such as sea‐level rise, droughts, floods and heatwaves are unequally distributed across the globe. The unequal vulnerability to climate impacts is due not only to physical factors such as exposure and sensitivity to climate risks, but also to social factors such as levels of inequality, marginalization and social injustice, which determine people's adaptive capacity (IPCC, 2014a, p. 21), and by political factors such as government effectiveness, levels of democracy and levels of corruption (Baatz & Bourban, 2019; Mikulewicz, 2018). The second inequality is in the contribution to climate change: developed countries and affluent people are the most important historical and current emitters of GHGs.…”

Promoting justice in global climate policies

“…From 2010 to 2019, a total of $2.6 trillion was invested in renewable capacity (UNEP 2019). 13 for more information on the democracy criterion and its relationship with other prioritization criteria, see Baatz and Bourban (2019). 14 I am grateful to Lisa Broussois and Éloi Laurent for their very helpful comments and suggestions on how to improve this chapter.…”