Tag Archives: climate change

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 →