New figures show the world’s poorest miss out on climate cash

Islamabad : Figures shared in a latest research report show that the world’s poorest miss out on climate cash, despite being hardest hit.

The report ‘Just add water: a landscape analysis of climate finance for water’, carried out by the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) and commissioned by WaterAid, says that just 1 per cent of the billions pledged globally to fight climate change goes to protecting and providing water for vulnerable communities,

It states that as droughts and floods hit hard the poorest countries, only under 1 per cent of climate investment goes to protecting water services for poor communities. It says that poor countries are offered loans - not grants - to protect themselves from climate change and some of the most vulnerable countries get only $ 1/person/year for water services.

The research contains detailed analysis of the climate finance landscape for water was commissioned to help establish where donors and national governments need to consider re-prioritising climate investment. It has been released ahead of the first global meeting of all public development banks to discuss climate change, the Finance in Common Summit, which takes place today, November 12, 2020.

Two billion people across the world – that’s nearly a third - lack access to a safe and reliable supply of water at home. And with increasingly severe and frequent droughts, floods and extreme weather events, these vulnerable people will find it impossible to be resilient against the impacts of climate change unless we see real change, WaterAid has said.

Jonathan Farr, Senior Policy Analyst for Climate Change at WaterAid says that the climate crisis is playing out before our eyes already, from devastating flooding in Pakistan to droughts in Zambia. The report found that programmes to provide water, decent toilets and good hygiene (known collectively as WASH services) in rural areas and at community scale, which many vulnerable people depend on, receive little. Only 10 per cent of the climate-related finance allocated for water programmes by international donors goes to such programmes. That’s just 0.99 per cent of the total climate-related finance they commit, overall.

In some countries in which access to water is already poor, that’s around $1 per person per year for the people facing the droughts, flooding and disease which climate change is already bringing about.