Lehrende

In addition to amplifying extreme weather events, climate change also causes or intensifies slow-onset processes such as sea-level rise, desertification, biodiversity loss or permafrost thaw. Both types of climate change impacts cause loss and damage, impede the enjoyment of human rights and can be drivers for human mobility. In contrast to extreme weather events, dealing with loss and damage caused by slow-onset processes in the context of climate change is still neglected, both at the national and international level.

African countries have considerable and largely untapped potential in renewable energies. They have the potential to leapfrog to smart, participatory, distributed energy systems of the future without locking themselves into stranded fossil fuel assets and overly centralised energy systems. Thus, African countries can show the way to the future through bold plans and on-the-ground implementation.

Climate and disaster risk financing (CDRF) measures and activities that governments or other actors carry out can affect the enjoyment of human rights. The Paris Agreement therefore recognises that, “Parties should, when taking action to address climate change, respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights […]” (Paris Agreement 2015). This paper presents a human rights-based approach to Climate and Disaster Risk Financing (HRBA-CDRF).

In our globalized world public policy making and society at large face challenges like climate change and financial crises that are global, shared worldwide and tightly connected with policies across different sectors. Solutions for addressing such highly interconnected challenges in a ‘system of systems’ world, tend to address only subsystems and so fail to achieve systemic change and anticipate impact and unintended consequences of public action. Pursuing the necessity of informing the policy decision process and proactively sensing possible problems concerning global matters we are proposing a novel computational platform called SYMPHONY that offers a solution for designing and testing policies and regulatory measures. Our aim is to offer policy modellers and policy makers tools that will support them to make decisions which will prevent and mitigate economic and financial crises as well as foster an economically and ecologically sustainable growth path.

On December 13, the Board of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) adopted a new strategy for the energy sector. The strategy will have an impact on the use of billions of Euros of public funds in the energy sector. Unfortunately, the strategy represents a missed chance to truly align all investments by the banks with the goals of the Paris climate agreement. Although the strategy has made progress compared to the previous energy strategy, it is far less ambitious then the precedent set by the World Bank in 2017 that excludes all financing of upstream oil and gas activities.

The world’s climate goals can only be reached with enough high quality financial support. Multilateral development banks (MDBs) have to play a vital role in efforts to shift global finance flows towards a sustainable future.
The report aims to support the ongoing efforts by MDBs to achieve alignment between their activities and the global climate goals and to help shareholders and stakeholders to screen projects and strategies for Paris alignment. It can also serve as a discussion basis for the efforts of other financial institutions to align their financial flows.