One thing developing countries, including Jamaica, are clear on after last month’s COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan, is that there won’t be a lot of money sloshing around to help them adjust to the ravages of global warming.
They left Baku, the Azerbaijani capital, with a pledge from the world’s wealthy nations to increase their funding to poor nations for climate resilience to US$300 billion a year by 2035, against the old target of US$100 billion annually, which was achieved in 2022, two years later than the deadline.
There was also an agreement that climate financing for developing countries, from all sources, should reach US$1.3 trillion in a decade’s time. However, poor countries, including this one, have good cause to be sceptical that these targets will be adhered to and that if they are reported to have been, the numbers will be real.
First, developing countries, which contributed relatively little to the spewing of the Earth-heating greenhouse gases over the last 150 years, argue that they need at least $1.3 trillion a year to deal with the crisis. So many described what emerged from Baku as insulting.
Indeed, India’s chief negotiator, Chandni Raina, called what was agreed in Baku “an optical illusion”.
“It is not something that will enable the conducive climate action that is necessary for the survival of our country,” she said.
Indeed, several delegations of the group of least developed countries and small island developing countries, which are among the most vulnerable to climate change, walked out of the conference as it became apparent that the die was cast on funding.
“We came here, to this COP (conference of the parties), for a fair deal,” the chairman, Credric Shuster, a Samoan official, said. “We feel we haven’t been heard.”
Said Juan Carlos Monterrey Gómez, Panama’s special envoy on climate matters: “Developed countries always throw text at us at the last minute, shoving it down our throat, and then, for the sake of multilateralism, we accept it, otherwise the climate mechanism will go into a horrible downward spiral.”
Yet it was not only what was pledged at issue. There was also the uncertainty that promises would be kept.
One thing developing countries, including Jamaica, are clear on after last month’s COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan, is that there won’t be a lot of money sloshing around to help them adjust to the ravages of global warming.
FUDGED THE NUMBERS
Developed countries, some say, fudged the numbers to show compliance with the US$100 billion pledged of Copenhagen by reclassifying existing aid as well as by jacking up the numbers with loans that add to the debt burdens of already highly indebted poor countries.
They, the argument goes, also fiddle with the numbers by not having clear rules on what counts as climate financing and with inconsistent methodologies for calculating reduction in greenhouse gases.
All this is against the backdrop of warnings by scientists that in the absence of aggressive action to reduce emissions, the goal of keeping the rise of Earth’s temperature by the end of the century to below 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to the 1850s, would be futile. That target could be surpassed, on the current trajectory, by the 2030s and Earth could, by 2100, be 3.7 degrees hotter than at the start of the last industrial period. These concerns are being complicated by the imminent return of Donald Trump, a climate sceptic, as the US president, of the possibility of America’s withdrawal from climate agreements.
The outlook, in the circumstances, could be grim for Jamaica given rising sea levels that threaten its coastal regions, where the bulk of the population lives as being the main centres of industry and commerce, including the crucial tourism industry.
At the same time, extreme weather events, such as longer droughts, more violent storms, and severe floods, happen more frequently. This demands adapting existing infrastructure, and the building of new ones, so as to have a chance of meeting these challenges.
CAN’T COUNT ON
But as the follow-on from previous COP sessions and the outcomes of Banku demonstrate, Jamaica can’t count on developed countries to fulfil their moral and ethical obligation to contribute at the levels required to fix a problem that is largely of their making.
So even as it must insist that rich countries do what is right, Jamaica has to do as best as it can, with its own resources, to harden its infrastructure to survive the climate crisis. Yet even without the overburden of a hotter climate, much of the island’s infrastructure is in poor shape, the result of decades of underinvestment, inadequate investment, and neglect.
The recent complaints by the political opposition about the dangers posed to communities by Kingston’s network of inadequately maintained gullies, the capital’s primary drainage system, is a case in point. Indeed, a years-old master plan for an upgraded drainage system remains unattended because of a lack of money.
The administration is about to launch a J$45 billion project to patch the island’s potholed roads and repair drains and verges, but Prime Minister Andrew Holness has conceded that the money is insufficient to do what is really required.
The bottom line is that the Government doesn’t have the money, or in the argot of the times, the fiscal space, to spend adequately on fixing infrastructure. The economy hasn’t, for several decades, grown sufficiently to generate the surpluses and the taxes for the Government to afford these necessary expenditures.
This failure is exacerbated by the requirement that Jamaica run high primary balances – as much as 7.5 per cent of GDP – in the quest to reduce the national debt, as a percentage of gross domestic product, to 60 per cent by 2027. It is now around 72 per cent of GDP.
This newspaper believes that Jamaica’s previous level of debt – over 140 per cent of GDP – was not only unstainable but a hindrance to consistent and robust growth. The Government’s appetite for debt starved the private sector of capital for investment. However, we are also clear that macroeconomic stability, as necessary as it is, is not of itself a sufficient condition for sustainable growth. It has to be accompanied by much else, including tolerable infrastructure.
In the context of what now faces Jamaica, and what has already been achieved in debt reduction and macroeconomic stability, it is worthwhile, we believe, that there be a serious discussion about rephasing the rate of debt reduction so as to free resources for investment in infrastructure and other critical areas.
To be clear, this is not a call for the abandonment of fiscal rectitude or for the opening of the spigots to wanton spending on public consumption that offer little economic return. Rather, it is about a national dialogue on how to extract value from the investment already made without squandering what has been achieved.
