Tag Archives: climate change

COP Co-Opted: How Corruption and Undue Influence Threaten Multilateral Climate Action

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The ongoing COP 29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, has been living up to the anticorruption community’s worst fears. Risks of undue influence, corporate capture, and corruption arising from yet another authoritarian petrostate hosting a UN climate conference are rampant. (See reports by Global Witness / BBC and OCCRP.)

Tomorrow, November 15, David Szakonyi, Co-Founder of the Anticorruption Data Collective, Associate Professor, George Washington University, and GAB contributor (here) will present a recent report examining the risks and outlining what the UNFCCC, the UN process for curbing climate change, can do to protect future COPs from corporate capture.

 The report was produced by the Collective in partnership with Transparency International.

The virtual event will be held 10:00 – 11:15am EST and is hosted by the Central Asia Program at George Washington University. Along with Professor Szakonyi it features, Kate Watters, Emin Bayramli, and Karl Horberg. 

Register here

Event link

Announcement: Safeguarding Carbon Markets Challenge

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Phyllis Dininio, the Chief of Party for the USAID-funded Countering Transnational Corruption Grand Challenge, contributes the following announcement:

Carbon markets, which enable the trading of carbon credits and emission allowances, can help reduce carbon emissions by channeling funds from those seeking to offset their carbon emissions to those who can reduce emissions through conservation, renewables, forest protection, and other initiatives. Yet carbon markets entail important corruption risks. To take just a few examples:

  • In the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the head of the ministry that manages forests embezzled around $38 million of funding from REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation), which provides a framework to give developing countries payments in exchange for reducing deforestation.
  • Also in the DRC, a French oil company and its local partner leased 70,000 hectares of land from the government to offset emissions by planting acacia trees; local farmers claim they were displaced from this land without appropriate consultation or compensation by the government.
  • In Slovakia, the government sold about 15 million tons of carbon offset units for half their market price to a firm that turned out to be a shell company run by people connected to the government; that firm turned around and sold the units for their market value, making $47 million.

To help address these sorts of problems, the USAID-funded Countering Transnational Corruption (CTC) Grand Challenge, in partnership with BHP Foundation and the Global Partnership for Social Accountability, has launched the Safeguarding Carbon Markets Challenge. The CTC Grand Challenge team is hoping to make awards of up to $500,000 in February 2025. And will accept concept notes until mid-August. Possible innovations might ways to improve procurement, certification, and licensing practices in carbon markets; efforts to improve oversight, transparency, and accountability; employing data transparency and risk assessment tools; improving land use tracking; and empowering communities, environmental journalists, and diverse civil society groups. The CTC team is also looking for partners to help with disseminating the call for proposals, serve as judges, support solvers as mentors or in testing out their solutions, provide further financial support to the challenge, or in other ways so please check out the website and get in touch.

Upcoming Symposium on Integrity in Climate Finance: Call for Contributions

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This coming May 9-10, the World Bank, Green Climate Fund, and Transparency International, together with several other partners, are jointly hosting a Symposium on Supranational Responses to Corruption: Integrity in Climate Finance and Action. The event will take place in London. The symposium theme is a timely one. At the most recent Global Conference of State Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, states and financial institutions committed to record-breaking financing for climate solutions across sectors, and established the structure of the long-awaited Loss & Damage Fund to help developing countries. But corruption and fraud remain significant risks to public and private investments across developed and developing countries, and this means that the vast mounts of money that will be needed to address global climate change may be exposed to substantial integrity risks.

The conference organizers have recently published a call for contributions, and they are encouraging practitioners and scholars from all relevant areas (finance, law, economics, technology, sociology, etc.) and sectors (government, private sector, academia, financial community, non-profit, international organizations, etc.) to submit proposals. The organizers particularly encourage proposals that take an interdisciplinary or cross-sectoral approach.

Proposed contributions should be submitted to IntegritySymposium@worldbank.org by February 4, 2024–two weeks from today.

We hope that many of you will consider submitting proposals and join our efforts to support a creative, efficient, and coordinated evolution of integrity policies to tackle the specific challenges arising from climate finance and action, helping ensure that the deployed resources are going where they are sorely needed.

 

 

 

Amazonia Is Burning. Corruption Is One of the Reasons.

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Amazonia is the largest tropical rainforest in the world, spread over nine South American countries (Brazil, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, French Guyana, Peru, Surinam, and Venezuela), with approximately 60% of the forest (over four million square kilometers) located in in the north of Brazil. Brazilian Amazonia is home to around 45,000 different plant and animal species. This rainforest is also crucial to the global environment, especially with respect to climate change. During the past several months, an increase in the number and extent of forest fires in Brazilian Amazonia has triggered great concern, much of it focused on whether the Bolsonaro Administration’s policies are partly to blame for the widespread fires. While that conversation is no doubt important, it is also crucial to recognize that environmental crimes in Amazonia—including those related to the fires—are in part the product of widespread corruption, and that addressing Amazonia’s environmental crisis will require addressing Brazil’s governance crisis as well.

To understand how and why corruption is contributing to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, a bit of background is in order. The greatest environmental threats in this region are the illegal harvesting of timber and the illegal clearing of land (often through burning) to prepare the land for commercial use for agriculture and livestock. (Between 70% and 80% of the deforested area in Amazonia has been used to create pasture for breeding cattle to produce meat for domestic and international consumption.) To be sure, Brazil has laws in place to protect Amazonia from over-exploitation and other forms of environmental damage. About 80% of the land in Amazonia is publicly owned; on this public land, the forest may not be exploited or burned. The remaining 20% of Amazonia is private land owned by individuals or corporations; even for this privately owned land, Brazilian law requires that the owners keep between 50% and 80% of the area intact and unexploited. The Brazilian government is responsible for enforcing these rules and for regulating and overseeing the extraction, transportation, and commercialization of timber from Amazonia. The regulatory system involves government approval of forest management plans, the issuance of permits for timber harvesting and land clearing, and the tracking of timber to ensure that it was not illegally removed from public lands or from the protected areas of private lands.

That’s how it’s supposed to work. But in practice, private companies collude with corrupt public servants—forest wardens, police officers, and others—to evade these rules. As a result, substantial quantities of timber are illegally extracted from public lands and protected private areas, and agricultural and livestock interests illegally burn and clear irreplaceable forests. The corrupted public servants not only turn a blind eye to these environmental crimes, but they also warn the infringers about possible inspections by other agents.

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To Fight Corruption, the Green Climate Fund Should Improve the Anticorruption Mechanisms in its Accreditation Process

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The Green Climate Fund (GCF), which the UN created in 2010, seeks to marshal pledges of $100 billion per year by 2020 from wealthy nations (which have been disproportionately and primarily responsible for the world’s carbon emissions), as well as other private and public sources, to finance climate change mitigation and adaptation projects in developing nations, which bear the greater share of adverse effects from those emissions. Last March, the United States delivered $500 million to the GCF, the first installment of the $3 billion pledge the United States made as part of the COP 21 UN Climate Summit last December. Climate and development advocates hope that the GCF will support development that is both “low-emission” and “climate-resilient,” helping countries limit greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to impacts of climate change. The GCF operates principally through so-called “accredited entities”—private and public sector subnational, national, regional, and international entities, which will implement climate change programs using GCF funds. These entities are selected through an accreditation process (hence the name), which assesses their ability to manage resources against the GCF’s fiduciary principles, environmental and social safeguards, and gender policy. Specific projects are assessed against investment criteria, including impact potential, sustainable development potential, responsiveness to recipients’ needs, promotion of country ownership, and efficiency.

As with many humanitarian or development aid efforts, the GCF is not without corruption risks. Recognizing this, the GCF Board approved an Initial Monitoring & Accountability Framework for the accredited entities that manage and implement GCF projects. Yet the GCF should do more to ensure that its basic accreditation mechanisms themselves rigorously evaluate entities for their capacities not only to disburse climate funds but also to monitor and address corruption. This up front assessment would complement efforts to ensure that entities, once accredited, remain faithful to the Fund’s fiduciary principles. The following aspects of the GCF accreditation process raise potential corruption risks, and the GCF should take steps to address them: Continue reading →

Guest Post: Fighting Corruption in Anti-Deforestation Programs — The Case of REDD+

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Aled Williams, Senior Advisor at the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, contributes the following guest post:

The protection of tropical forests is a hot topic, particularly in light of the pressing threat of global climate change. The 2014 UN Climate Summit saw a range of national and subnational governments, along with numerous business and civil society organizations, endorsed the New York Declaration on Forests, which set a timeline for cutting natural forest loss in half (by 2020) and ending it completely (by 2030). A major goal of the declaration is to agree at the upcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Paris is to reduce deforestation and forest degradation as part of a post-2020 global climate agreement. And financial contributions are now stacking up, with more than USD 9.6 billion pledged by 22 countries to the UN’s Green Climate Fund.

Securing a global climate agreement that includes tropical deforestation would no doubt be a historic achievement. But once world leaders return from Paris next year, the proof of the pudding will lie in national implementation. They may well wish to consider what can be learned from recent schemes for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (known as REDD+), to date largely funded by the Norwegian government through bilateral arrangements with major deforesters like Indonesia and Brazil, but also channeled through multilateral agencies. It turns out that even when donors have pledged substantial amounts of money, spending that money effectively can be challenging. A major part of that challenge relates to the difficult political-economy of forest sector reform in developing countries, where corruption in its various guises can be a core feature. Indeed, despite being described as a potential game-changer for addressing tropical deforestation, REDD+ financing also risks increasing corruption and related problems like land grabbing.

These challenges are not new and indeed were well-known among Norwegian aid practitioners as REDD+ pilots began some four years ago. But the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre has just completed a three year research project–based on case studies of REDD+ pilots in the DRC, Indonesia, Kenya, the Philippines, and Tanzania–that sheds some new light on the issues. The report’s empirical findings suggest three main lessons: Continue reading →