Do no harm: turning the finance tide green

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New narratives

Is 2023 going to be the year the world really starts putting its money where its mouth is when it comes to tackling the planet's climate and nature crises?

Pressure to do so is growing on all fronts, not least because many vulnerable countries are also heavily in debt.

Take an impoverished country like Somalia, battered by decades of conflict and now four consecutive failed rainy reasons, leaving more than 7 million people facing acute food insecurity, with more than 200,000 on the brink of starvation.

The problem is not so much that the international community has turned a blind eye. In fact, over the last half-decade, Somalia has received roughly $2 billion a year in development aid and humanitarian assistance from abroad.

Yet that money, while saving lives, is not being spent in a way that is going to build?longer-term resilience to climate-related pressures, such as drought and flash flooding, say local experts.

Somali farmers and pastoralists know what they need, according to Hassan Mowlid Yasin of the nonprofit Somali Greenpeace Association: better rainwater harvesting systems and wells with solar panels to help pull up scarce water.

"We have to change the narrative that local people do not have the capacity to manage finance," he argues.

Nature trail

For donor governments, rethinking how they hand out tax-payers' dollars will require a leap of faith - and, for some, more evidence that channelling it to community or indigenous groups gets the right results.

Meanwhile, philanthropists and billionaires were out in force at the World Economic Forum (#WEF23) last week, talking about how they want to make a bigger contribution, not least by experimenting with the riskier things governments tend to shy away from.

One new initiative announced in #Davos, called Giving to Amplify Earth Action (GAEA), plans to leverage capital from foundations like Jeff Bezos' to help generate the $3 trillion it says is needed each year from public and private sources to tackle climate and nature damage.

This week, we look at one small but beautiful example of where philanthropic funding is making a difference by?developing the Camino de Costa Rica, a 174-mile (280 km) footpath linking the Central American nation's Caribbean and Pacific coasts.

Mar a Mar, the association that designed and built the trail, says it’s bringing economic benefits to people in remote communities along the way - whether working as guides or offering accommodation to the hikers enjoying rainforests and mountains, instead of the more usual sand and sea tourism.

“We treat them well, we show them the beauty of nature, we tell them a bit about our culture, medicinal plants, and the animals,” says indigenous guide Osvaldo Martinez, who hopes to use his earnings to study economics at university.

Oil dangers

Meanwhile, in East Africa,?climate activists and local campaigners are fighting?what they see as misguided money going into building a huge pipeline to transport crude oil from Lake Albert in Uganda to Tanzania so it can be exported.

Development groups have raised the alarm about the impacts on the climate - saying the pipeline will generate 34 million tonnes of carbon emissions annually, roughly the same as Bahrain - and on communities, as an estimated 14,000 households are at risk of losing their land.

But climate campaigners in Uganda are increasingly being targeted and stifled under the law, according to the Kampala-based Africa Institute for Energy Governance.

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