Financing change – can the Roundtable in Cape Town deliver hope before Copenhagen?

Posted by Sabrina Chesterman on October 21, 2009
Politics, South Africa

With hopes fading for a comprehensive climate treaty as the clock ticks down to Copenhagen, increasing focus will be placed on interim measures and incremental agreements that can be formalised at Copenhagen.  Coming just six weeks before the summit, the United Nations Environment Program Finance Initiative (UNEP FI) is hosting its Global Roundtable in Cape Town.  The first time the event has been hosted in Africa, the Roundtable, which opens this evening, aims to partner environmental groups under the umbrella of UNEP with representatives of the financial sector and provide a forum for discussing and setting new agendas for sustainable finance.

 The summits focus, ‘Financing Change, Changing Finance’ is timely, especially in lieu of flagging momentum for a comprehensive agreement at Copenhagen. Governments and political momentum has illustrated its weakness this year in overcoming major barriers to enacting an agreement at Copenhagen, for example Congress’s inability to implement and legislate binding targets on emissions has resulted in many feeling Copenhagen might be a wasted opportunity before it has begun. This does however mean focus may now shift more in favour of the private sector, which has an opportunity to show what collaborative and innovative financing architecture can achieve. 

The volatility of the finance and evolving capital markets means there is no simple step to implementing sustainable financing mechanism, especially with regards to ecosystem services where there is not a fixed or easily measurable metric or asset. However the planetary implications of climate change and global ecosystem loss mean there is momentum to get discussions on the table and integrate climate, poverty and social dimensions into financing mechanisms.

The Roundtable will have wide representation from major financial institutions including Peter Blom, CEO of Triodos, the Financial Times Sustainable Bank of the Year as well as a host of South African and international private banks, financial analyst firms, global players in the insurance business and suite of the leading global environmental NGOs like the WWF. The event is unique in bringing together top calibre financing institutions and venture capitalists with the leading brains behind innovations in environmental finance like Pavan Sukhdev, the ‘Stern’ of ecosystem services, as study leader for The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB).

The timing of the event and amalgamation of speakers and attendees means there is an opportunity to deliver some hope before Copenhagen in working towards incremental financing mechanisms. One hopes the ‘butterfly effect’ of changing finance can inspire the existing political barriers in building momentum before Copenhagen.

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Comments

  • rose macaskie

    Talking of interim measures, I have a idea that might complement reducing green house gasses. I am British living in Spain which made me notice how overgrazing bares the land, and in countries in the North, as well as the south, land is not just left bare because it is overgrazed it is also left bare because it is left fallow, grain crops cause a lot of land to be left bare. As i understand it, and i am not a phisicist so excuse me if i am wrong, sunlight heats the atmosphere when it hits particles in the air and when it hits the ground and earth has very good thermal mass properties so the sun should heat the ground more if what the sun hits is earth than if it hits vegetation, that what covers the ground hit by the sun reduces or increases the power of the suns rays to heat the ground as I understand it. Where the ground is covered with vegetation that aislates it from the suns rays, dry vegetation in summer in the mediteranean and green vegetation in winter, the suns rays would warm us less and if you consider how many kilometres of ground are left bare in all the world changing this could change the temperature a lot and as it is so hard for heat to escape now greenhouse gasses are accumulating in the air everything we can do to reduce how much we get heated in the first place must be a good idea.
    I have a sub and related bit of information. Having a house in a spanish village has allowed me to discover that they have a mania about fire risk here were the ground cover all dries in summer making fire risk great. Overgrazing is not the fault of goats but of shepherds who purposefully go over the same piece of land again and again to reduce fire risk in summer, they have a lot of territory in the mountains so reducing the vegetation only means they have to walk further which they are willing to do to save their villages. They also use herbicides to the same end and to help those who shoot boar and deer move through the brush in the winter hunting season which is one source of income in mountainouse districts, people will pay well to hunt.If you want to increase vegetation it would be as well to look for alternative methods of reducuiing fire risk to overgrazing, at the same time you can greatly increase the wealth from farming in villages if you increase the amount of ground cover availiable for their live stock. Maybe overgrazing in bands alternated with bands of optimum vegetation, would reduce fire risk at the same time as increasing vegetation or you could work at convincing villagers that it is worth losing their homes periodically to have optimum vegetation, i am not sure about the moralitiy of this last measure, but combined wit hother measures it may just be true they couldd produce more food and do better in the lon grun if they had a greater acceptance of fire risk. The people in califorornia seem convinced of the benefits of fire to the point the except loss of property i heard one perwoson say they expect to have their houses burnt down every seven years. I should think this fear of fires might be a major desertification factor in other countries not just in spain where they leave the hillsides to the kind offices of hardy bushes cystus bushes principally when overgrazing has done for all vegetation on the hills that is why the country survives the overgrazing. I should think fear of fires is a motive for desertification in many other countries because it seems probable that all fire risk and farming ideas move from Spain to China and back over the mileniums. and because in my few visits to other mediterranian countries i have seen exactly the same lack of top soil and erosion. The fire risk is much greater in a place with a dry season than in other places. rose macaskie madrid.

    July 29 2011
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