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climate change adaptation. For most developing countries, poverty alleviation is their number one priority and they simply do not have the funds to tackle climate change. These countries insist that the Polluter Pays Principle should be applied when deciding who should pay for the financial impacts of climate change. This simply means that the countries which should be responsible for financing climate change adaptation and also mitigation measures should be the developed nations which produced the greenhouse gases that caused climate change in the first place. Western nations are reluctant to loosen their purse strings.

Although negotiations at the 2007 United Nations Climate Change conference in Bali resulted in the setting up of an Adaptation Fund for developing countries, the amount realised so far is just under $40 million. This merely scratches the surface of the $40 billion per year, needed by developing countries for climate change adaptation.

As negotiations towards setting up a new climate change regime to replace Kyoto continue, the one area lacking any real progress is that of funding for technology transfer from developed to developing nations for climate change adaptation and mitigation. The problem of ownership of intellectual property comes in, since technologies are owned by businesses not countries, and the leaders of many developed nations are of the opinion that developing countries might use such technologies to further their own industrial development. Whether the developed countries have a valid argument or not, for many developing countries the way forward is to link climate change with the sustainable development agenda while the topic is still hot.

References

(1) Organization of American States (OAS), Assistant Secretary General Albert R. Ramdin, Caribbean Seminar Series, Washington, 2007.

(2) Final report of "Climate Change: Here and Now" working retreat, The European Commission and the Alliance of Small Island States, September 2007

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