The Need for Climate Change Resilience in Urban Infrastructure: A Closer Look at Sri Lanka

By Chatura Rodrigo
IPS Reseracher 

Introduction

  

Rapid urbanization has aggravated the deficiencies of basic services and infrastructure in the developing world, particularly in the Asia and Pacific. In many of these countries, evolving infrastructure can be particularly climate-sensitive and therefore highly vulnerable to natural disasters. Because climate-related events cut across socio-economic sectors and administrative jurisdictions, they can jeopardize development objectives in distant places. Public infrastructure tends to be multifunctional in nature and serves a range of diverse stakeholders spread over a wide geographic area; directly or indirectly providing critical services to the areas they cover. Interruptions in services can cause negative economic impacts over a large territory. The lack of reliable services impedes a country’s ability to pursue development goals. For this reason, it is vital that development strategies incorporate efforts to increase the climate resilience of infrastructure, especially taking into consideration the risks of climate change.

Multiple Actors: The Challenge of Building Adaptive Capacity to Climate Change in Sri Lanka

By Centre for Poverty Analysis[1]
Introduction

Climate change is a global phenomenon that is predicted to disproportionately impact low and middle income nations who have less economic stability and greater levels of poverty. Poor communities within these societies who are least able to withstand external shocks will face the brunt of the impact. They will need support from the state and non-state actors to be better prepared, protected and enabled to recover from these shocks. This situation challenges developing countries to meet economic and social development agendas while reducing or minimizing the impact on the natural environment. It is challenging developing countries to adopt sustainable pathways to development that try to achieve a sustainable balance between human and environmental wellbeing. In Sri Lanka, efforts to put in place more sustainable practices and to address climate change are taking shape. Various interventions are advocated and are being tested from policy to practice, involving a range of stakeholders or “actors”. This essay examines how different levels of actors attempt to address climate change. It uses an actor-based approach to analyze what enables or impedes adaptation for different levels of actors and draws from a study carried out within the context of agriculture, fisheries, and tourism livelihoods in coastal areas of Sri Lanka.

Sri Lankan Perspective on Clean Development Mechanism: Approach Towards Climate Change Mitigation

By Chatura Rodrigo

 IPS Researcher 

Background: Introducing the CDM

As defined by Article 12 in the Kyoto Protocol under the United Nation Frameworks Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Clean Development Mechanisms (CDMs) are one of three flexible mechanisms established with the purpose of assisting Annex I countries of the UNFCC to archive their committed amount of emission reduction in cost effective ways.  It also allows contributions for the sustainable development of Non Annex I countries such as Sri Lanka.

The CDM is one of the Protocol's "project-based" mechanisms; in that the CDM is designed to promote projects that reduce emissions. The CDM is based on the idea of emission reduction "production". These reductions are "produced" and then subtracted against a hypothetical "baseline" of emissions. The emissions baselines are the emissions that are predicted to occur in the absence of a particular CDM project. CDM projects are "credited" against this baseline, in the sense that developing countries gain credit for producing these emission cuts.

Since 2001, the CDM projects have issued 1 billion Certified Emission Reduction (CER) units. Approximately, 63% of all CERs had been issued for projects based on destroying either Hydrofluorocarbons (42%) or Nitrous Oxide (21%), which is a conventional way of creating CERs.  However, at the moment, the European Commission is proposing a full ban on CER’s from industrial gas projects. More than 1,000 CDM projects have qualified for carbon credits.  Most of these are large-scale activities in the energy sector; in the waste sector, subsidized technologies include landfill gas, incineration, and cement kilns.  India and China are the biggest takers, with a combined share of more than 50% of the projects.  With some 3000 more projects awaiting registration, the CDM expects to generate nearly 3 billion CERs by 2012. Trade in CERs currently runs to an estimated US$ 10 bn a year.  This has fueled a gigantic, global carbon trading market that is raking in huge profits for financing companies, consulting firms, brokers, and other market players. Currently there are five exchanges trading in carbon allowances: the European Climate Exchange, NASDAQ OMX Commodities Europe, PowerNext, Commodity Exchange Bratislava, and the European Energy Exchange.