Climate change challenges for European development co-operation: emerging issues

Working paper no. 3:

This paper addresses the new problems for the development co-operation agenda, posed by the impacts of climate change in developing countries, in terms of physical impacts such as increased severity of droughts and floods, and in terms of potential adverse effects of policy measures taken by developed countries to mitigate climate change.

This paper reviews that main policy processes that have been developed within the European Union (EU) for addressing climate change in the context of development co-operation, both through the implementation of domestic policy measures and through pushing policy processes at the international level. It then looks at progress within the EU in terms of three of the main challenges that climate change poses to development co-operation, including: (i) How to bridge the large gap in funding climate change response efforts in developing countries; (ii) How to ensure well coordinated, complementary and coherent efforts between different donors and between climate change and development policy processes; and (iii) How to ‘mainstream’ climate change into development co-operation in the EU.

The paper concludes with a summary of some of the further issues that need to be resolved, especially as regards: (i) The suitability of different financing options in terms of meeting the needs of developing countries and domestic interests; (ii) The added value of the European Commission’s (EC) own initiatives compared to other options, including those of the Member States; (iii) The role of development co-operation vis-à-vis new emerging funding mechanisms under the UNFCCC; and (iv) What the options are for more quickly building on progress in main-streaming climate change in the context of new aid modalities and within other sectoral European policy areas.

The paper is the first in a series of outputs on climate change and development co-operation in the European Development Co-operation to 2020 (EDC2020) project, which will look in more depth at these issues.