Climate change

ETC supports stakeholder involvement in climate change studies (adaptation and resilience) and policy dialogue.

Background

Reports show that deforestation, aridity, floods and degradation of agricultural land, is still increasing, which often affects the poor particularly where they depend on natural resources for their livelihoods. Worldwide economic growth and climate change continue to put pressure on ecosystems.

Environmental degradation and climate change will make it even more difficult to meet the Millenium Development Goals’s (MDG's). The recent increasing public attention for climate change offers new opportunities for poverty alleviation:

• more focus on energy and deforestation
• the resilience of livelihoods and the capacity to adapt to changes
• the growing demand for biofuels
• increasing prices for agricultural products.

Obviously, thereare also threats related to these developments such as the effect on food security, i.e. the dilemma touse the land for food or fuels.

In The Netherlands, the climate change issue generates many initiatives within NGO’s and private sector. Activities are e.g. trying to make 1 million Dutch people climate-neutral by compensation of their CO2-emission via sustainable energy and forestry projects in development countries. Another example is to make companies or specific products climate-neutral, such as the Rabobank credit card that compensates the emission of greenhouse gasses of all purchases.

ETC and Climate Change

ETC Energy has been directly working on climate change adaptation in the Netherlands through the Netheralnds Climate Assistance Programme (NCAP) funded by DGIS. This programme ended in 2008 and ETC continous the ambition to initiate new activities related to adaptation and reducing the vulnerability of poor livelihoods.

In fact, in most of the current programmes ETC is dealing with the latter. ETC takes care that these programmes, particularly those related to natural resources management, pay attention to the (potential) impacts of climate change for the poor and explore how they can help to address these.

ETC signed the Klimaatakkoord of Schokland, a partnership of Dutch NGO’s, private companies, knowledge institutes. At the moment ETC is exploring how this partnership can help to improve current activities, and whether there are opportunities for joint projects.