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Briefings and reports

Find out more about climate change and climate debt and how they are disastrous for the world's poor by reading our briefings and reports

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Climate debt campaigns

Find out more about our campaigns on climate debt.

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Climate Change

This page brings together the latest WDM news and commentary on climate change – the greatest challenge facing humanity. This is both an environmental, developmental and global justice issue. While rich countries are responsible for almost three quarters of the excessive carbon emissions driving climate change, it is poor countries that bear the brunt of the impact.

 

Climate change

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Our speaker tour is over but the action is just starting

Eight events in towns and cities across the UK, two amazing activists from South Africa, local speakers, and countless train journeys.... our speaker tour, ‘Africa demands climate justice’ has just come to an end.

Speaker tour audience and podium

However, we were determined when planning this speaker tour that we would avoid simply creating a series of one-off events that people attended and left, feeling better informed about climate justice but taking little else away.

We aimed to galvanize people into planning actions between now and the UN climate talks in Durban, starting on 28 November. We’ve seen some really exciting discussions taking place and it’s incredible how much energy can be created in a room, when a number of like-minded people come together, fired up by the very real stories of injustice faced by poor communities in South Africa.

We know that it’s vital that WDM’s work with our allies in the global south incorporates the opportunity for UK campaigners to hear directly from southern activists. As one WDM group member said: “It's personal stories and experiences like Bongani's that keep me inspired.”

Actions discussed have included the idea of a...

Video: interview with Bandile Mdlalose from Abahlali baseMjondolo

Bandile Mdlalose is general secretary of Abahlali baseMjondolo, a shack-dwellers' movement in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. She represents Abahlali on the civil society committee set up in response to UN climate talks in Durban, working on mobilisation and education.

She was interviewed by Miriam Ross, our media officer.

...

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Climate change in the shacks

Bandile Mdlalose

Bandile is general secretary of Abhalali baseMjondolo, a shack-dwellers movement representing tens of thousands of people in South Africa. She's taking part in our speaker tour, Africa demands climate justice, which runs from 3-13 October 2011.

Climate change is one of the main issues facing the world at this moment. We all know that when things go wrong, like when there is an earthquake, a flood or a drought poor people are most vulnerable. And usually the response to these disasters is a second disaster for poor people. 

For instance in Sri Lanka the so-called ‘development’ after the Tsunami forcibly removed fisherfolk from their coastal land and gave it to developers to build hotels. Sometimes the attempts to prevent disaster are also a disaster for the poor. In South Africa when it is acknowledged that we are using too much electricity it is not the big companies or the rich that have the police and the security guards kick down their doors to disconnect them. In other countries in Africa, poor rural people are being forced off their land so that it can be used for bio-fuels. Maybe this will slow down...

UN climate deal on the brink ahead of Durban talks

The UN climate talks, COP17, begin at the end of November. This could be the last chance to save the current international climate deal. The first period of the Kyoto protocol ends in 2012 and rich industrialised countries are pushing to replace it with a system that is based on voluntary reductions in carbon emissions instead.

In the run up to the negotiations, we have produced a new briefing, Durban, a tipping point for the international climate talks which sets out what we see as the key issues facing us. There will be attempts to reach agreements on issues such as climate finance, technology adaptations and forests but it is possible that there will be no deal at all. There are three issues that we are particularly concerned about.

 The role of the World Bank

At last years’ negotiations in Cancun, there was an agreement to set up a new green climate fund to provide funding to countries affected by climate change. But none of the key details were agreed – other than handing a central role to the World Bank

The widely discredited World Bank is attempting to reinvent itself as the...

COP 17, Durban - A tipping point for the international climate talks

The UN climate talks in Durban, in late November 2011, could be our last chance to save the current international climate deal. The first period of the Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012, and its continuation is in doubt as rich industrialised countries push to replace it with a system that allows them to pledge the reduction of emissions on a voluntary basis.

The talks are also expected to set up a new fund to deliver finance needed by countries affected by climate change.

Huge divisions remain between rich and poorer countries over the design of the fund, on issues such as whether it should be an independent institution and whether the money should be given or leant. The role of the discredited and undemocratic World Bank is also likely to be controversial as it, and rich countries, push to give it a central role in climate finance against the wishes of developing countries. 

Download briefing (PDF)

 

Clean up the bailed-out banks

WDM campaigned to clean up the bailed-out banks between 2009 and 2011.

Terms and conditions of the bailed out banks

Background

Following the financial crisis of 2008, the UK government used a staggering £45.5 billion of UK taxpayers’ money – the GDP of Kenya and Tanzania combined – to prop up the Royal Bank of Scotland.

RBS used that public money to finance projects and companies that threaten the climate and human rights, such as tar sands extraction in Madagascar and Canada.

WDM campaigned to get the government to rein in the power of RBS and the other bailed-out banks and force them to keep to the highest environmental and human rights standards when investing our money.

Successes

  • After sustained campaigning by WDM, including meetings with RBS group chairman Sir Philip Hampton and other board members, RBS’s 2010 and 2011 sustainability reports for the first time highlighted the issue of tar sands mining. Significantly, they also committed RBS to developing external environmental, social and ethical risk statements and internally implementing similar policies for oil and gas, mining and metals...

Our climate debt campaign goes to Eastleigh - Chris Huhne's constituency

Aamina Ahmad, used to be campaigns and policy intern

Last week Sarah Reader and I ventured down to Barton Peveril College, Eastleigh - in energy and climate change minister Chris Huhne's constituency - to talk about our climate justice campaign.

Chris Huhne will be taking part in the upcoming UN climate negotiations in South Africa and we are keen to make contact with people in his constituency who can lobby him over his view that the UK's climate finance should be given as loans through the undemocratic World Bank. The World Bank has a long history of funding projects which are destructive to the environment and one of the aims of our campaign is for UK climate finance being given as grants through the more transparent UN Adaptation Fund instead. In the run up to the climate talks it is necessary that we increase the pressure on Chris Huhne.

We spoke to a group of sixth-form students and at first I was slightly perplexed over how to engage 16-18 year olds in the campaign. But I had underestimated the ‘alternative’ kids who were really responsive to us and willfully signed...

Stop Climate Chaos Scotland letter-writing campaign

Introduction

The Scottish Climate Change Act came into being in 2009, and since then the Scottish Government has done a great deal to promote its world-leading legislation, which includes a 42% reduction in Scotland’s own emissions by 2020, and 80% by 2050. More recently, the Scottish Government has produced an action plan called the ‘Report on Proposals and Policies’ which sets out which policies will be needed for Scotland to be able to achieve these targets.

This next Scottish Budget must reflect Scotland’s climate change ambitions. The Scottish Government is currently putting together the 2012-13 budget as well as a four-year spending review. The Scottish Parliament will then scrutinise the Budget and it will be agreed in February 2012. But this autumn is the key time to influence it, while it’s still in its early stages.

Why it matters

Recently, in its advice to Scottish Ministers, the UK Climate Change Committee stated that: ‘Scottish emissions reduction targets can be met at manageable economic cost... and should be accepted given the costs and consequences of not acting’.

Action in Scotland to reduce our emissions is a vital part of a just response to climate change. Whilst rich countries are responsible for most of the emissions...

Two years on: would Arnie still back Scotland's action on climate change?

In 2009, the Scottish government passed world-leading climate legislation when the Scottish parliament voted for climate change targets of 42% emissions reductions by 2020 and 80% by 2050. For a short time, Scotland made headlines, with praise for the achievement arriving from across the globe. Climate campaigners in Scotland, myself included, were especially pleased when the ‘Governator’ himself, Arnold Schwarzenegger, then Governor of California gave the Act his thumbs-up, quoted as saying that ‘Scotland’s ambitious and comprehensive targets...sends a message to the world that we must act now and we must act swiftly’.

But, three years on, would Arnie be able to say anything positive about climate action by the Scottish government since the Act was passed? Are we as climate campaigners happy to use the same e-postcards in 2011 that we designed then, with pictures of Mr. Universe himself showing off his honed physique and proclaiming ‘Scotland’s climate change act has muscle!’?

During the Scottish parliamentary debate on the climate change bill, the opposition environment spokesperson at the time, Sarah Boyack MSP, asserted that ‘Our challenge is not passing this bill but implementing it’ – a prediction that, as you might expect, has proved accurate. Since the...

More World Bank ‘climate loans’ get the go ahead: the next few months of campaigning ahead of the Durban climate talks will be crucial

Kirsty Wright, climate justice campaigner.

This June, we launched our Climate Loan Sharks report to coincide with a meeting of one of the World Bank’s climate funds, the Pilot Programme for Climate Resilience (PPCR). The fund was set up by rich donor countries such as the UK to provide finance to developing countries to help them adapt to the impacts of climate change. However the fund actually locks these countries into deeper debt by giving out finance as loans, rather than grants, in the name of tackling the impacts of climate change these countries did nothing to cause.

Meeting outcomes

The meeting of the PPCR, which took place in South Africa, was set to decide new climate loans for Cambodia, Mozambique, Nepal, St Lucia and Zambia. At the meeting the proposals for all five countries were approved; meaning that in total over $400m of new debt will be created. These countries are all already debt burdened, with two having already qualified for partial debt cancellation, highlighting the absurdity of building up this debt once again. In total, for the 11 countries that have had funding approved by the PPCR so far, over $1...

Climate loan sharks: how the UK is making developing countries pay twice for climate change

In Climate loan sharks, the World Development Movement and the Jubilee Debt Campaign reveal that the UK is pushing $1.1 billion of climate loans, via the World Bank, on some of the poorest countries in the world.

For example Grenada’s debt is already 90 per cent of GDP, yet it is to be lent a further $22 million, over 3 per cent of the country’s GDP. Lending to such debt burdened country is at best irresponsible and at worst wilfully dangerous.

The UK, and other rich industrialised countries in the global north, owe a debt to countries in the global south as compensation for the devastating effects of climate change they have the primary responsibility for creating. A key part of this compensation is providing finance to poorer countries to help reduce the negative impacts of climate change on their lives and livelihoods. 

The report finds: 

  • The UK is providing most of its climate finance for adaptation in the form of capital that can only be dispersed as loans through the World Bank’s Pilot Program for Climate Resilience (PPCR). Of the capital that will be given out as loans via the PPCR, 97 per cent comes from the UK. 
  • Of the...

Destructive World Bank projects around the world

The World Bank has a long history of funding projects that are destructive to the environment and undermine human rights, investing in projects regardless of their devastating impacts both on local populations and on our planet. 

The case studies selected here demonstrate the range of projects (both geographically, and by type) that the Bank invests in, but they are by no means a definitive list. 

The World Bank has provided more than $6.7 billion in financing for these projects alone. The Bank has to be held to account for the crucial role it has played in fuelling climate change and human rights violations.

Click on the thumbnail images on the map to read about the destructive projects.

New film: curing RBS of its oil addiction

Do films motivate people any more than other kinds of campaign communication? Well, here’s one we produced on a very tiny budget aimed at informing an audience of the basic issues of our campaign to clean up the bailed out banks, in this case RBS, but also showing that campaigning on a serious issue can be imaginative, fun (dare I say zany?) and be about more than writing letters to politicians.

Does it do it for you? Have a look (it only lasts four minutes) and let us know what you think.

 

 

Climate loan sharks

Emma Rubach. This article originally appeared in The Big Issue

There’s been a lot in the press recently about the fact Britain’s aid budget is one of the few areas of public spending not facing cuts. Despite detractors wondering how we can spend money overseas when we don’t seem to have much to spend at home, the government has been vocally proud of its commitment to helping poor countries out of poverty and to reaching the Millennium Development Goals.
 

Unfortunately, a recent report by campaign group World Development Movement (WDM) suggests that while we’re giving with one hand, we could be taking away with the other, thanks to the decision to offer climate adaption loans to poor countries through the World Bank. Much like the payday loan companies who target vulnerable people in need, desperate countries on the frontline of climate change will be offered cash to help adapt to the problems climate shifts create. The World Bank appears to be offering a kindly leg-up in a time of need – but as we cash strapped folk well know, all loans have to someday be paid back.
 

As WDM points out, it’s unfair to expect developing countries whose emissions could fit into a thimble to pay for the...

Share skills for effective campaigning

This section is a space for groups and activists to share skills and tips for effective local campaigning.  If you have something you would like to share (anything that has worked particularly well for you, and tips on what to avoid too!) then please email them to sarah.reader@wdm.org.uk

Oil giant Total pauses Madagascar tar sands plans – for now

This Monday WDM campaigners came to the office with big smiles on their faces. Over the weekend, we’d heard that French Oil giant Total, subject to one of our latest online actions, had apparently cancelled its plans to mine tar sands in Madagascar.

High fives all around. Or?

As the story only seemed to have appeared on a mining industry website, we decided we needed to do some proper digging around. The first thing we did was get in touch with one of our allies in Madagascar. It can be just as hard for campaigners in Madagascar to get information as it is for us here, but their understanding is that Total isn’t going to pull out completely, but instead will extend its license to explore rather than moving on to full scale exploitation. 

This was also confirmed by Total’s business partner, ‘Madagascar Oil’ (based in Houston, not Madagascar), which announced last week that the two companies would not start full-scale mining, but will continue to test for the viability of both conventional oil and tar sands extraction.  

Basically, this means mining has been...

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