U.S. climate aid reaches across globe

At NASA headquarters, part of a map of Kenyan waterways blinks repeatedly in blue-gray, indicating where stream flow is heaviest and likely to cause flooding over the next 72 hours.

Halfway around the world, officials at Kenya’s Ministry of Water and Irrigation can see the same data, which they use to try to reduce the loss of life and property from increasingly frequent floods linked to global warming.

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The mapping technology is part of a collaboration by the space agency and the U.S. Agency for International Development that helps cash-strapped nations deal with the challenges of a changing climate. Over the past three years, the United States has ratcheted up support for foreign countries to cope with global warming, spending nearly $1.4 billion. A small slice of the total, $18 million, has transformed the satellite-based mapping program, called SERVIR, from a modest effort targeting seven countries in Central America to one serving 32 countries worldwide.

But even as spending rises, a central question remains: Are rich countries, which bear the historic responsibility for putting carbon dioxide into the air, doing enough to help the poorest nations prepare themselves for the negative effects of greenhouse gas emissions?

In 2009, the world’s leaders — including President Obama — promised to give $30 billion between 2010 and 2012 to a “fast-track finance” program to help cut the emissions worldwide and make the most vulnerable nations more resilient in the face of global warming, a process called adaptation. That same year, they pledged that by 2020, they would mobilize $100 billion for the two goals.

The United States has provided $7.5 billion in international climate aid over the past three years, nearly $1.4 billion of which has been spent on adaptation.

David Waskow, who directs Oxfam America’s climate-change program, praised the United States for ramping up the assistance, but he noted that while leaders agreed to a balanced division between cutting emissions and helping poor countries adapt to climate change, only 19 percent of the funding has gone toward adaptation.

“The percentage of what’s going to adaptation is not adequate,” Waskow said, noting that it is often hard to tell how much of the climate assistance is money that the United States and other countries would have given as foreign aid anyway.

Of the industrialized nations, according to Oxfam America, Japan has given roughly $2.1 billion, Britain has donated about $800 million and Canada has provided $121 million. The region that has benefited the most from multilateral adaptation funds is sub-Saharan Africa, according to Germany’s Heinrich Boll Foundation.

But many representatives from the developing world remain critical of rich nations. At the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change talks, the latest round of which is now underway in Doha, Qatar, one South African delegate spoke of the need for “restorative justice” because her country has experienced co­lo­ni­al­ism, apartheid and now, global warming. Farah Kabir, country director at ActionAid Bangladesh, said industrialized countries are obligated to pay for the effects of climate change because “those that are suffering the most have done the least to cause it.”