Report from Kenya: The Nairobi Guiding Principles of 2009
24/04/09 12:35
So many critical
issues surround climate change adaptation (and so
much bad news keeps popping up from climate impacts
science), I sometimes find knowing where to focus
very difficult. But sometimes there is good news.
I’ve just returned from a very fast meeting in
Nairobi, Kenya, at the United Nations compound.
Under the sponsorship of the Danish government, a
new global framework and set of guiding principles
for climate adaptation has been created (available
as a PDF download). These principles are aimed
at three distinct audiences: participants in and
observers of the big UNFCCC CoP meeting in Copenhagen in
December 2009, those institutions that are
funding climate adaptation work
right
now,
and the international movement to define climate
adaptation theory, policy, and practice in
coming decades. Here, I will provide personal
reflections on my attendance on the discussions
leading up to, at, and beyond the Nairobi
meeting.
This was my first
trip to Africa. On leaving the plane, I was hit by
the hot, moist air of the Kenyan rainy season. East
Africa didn’t feel like it was in the middle of a
severe drought, not with this humidity. My driver
stood outside of customs and passport control with
my name on a sign — I waived at him, and he
crossed over the barrier and shook my hand. We
walked out into the night, with Orion visible high
in the clear night sky. Nairobi was very dark for a
city with two million people.
We drove a few kilometers, my driver asking about Obama (“He is the first Kenyan president of America!”) and pointing out various landmarks (“This is the famous Uhuru Park”); Dolly Parton sang about estranged love on the minivan’s tape player. Just in front of the football stadium, we saw the outstretched arms of man in the middle of the very dark, unlit road. He wildly tried to direct us around him as we slowed down. I assumed he must be high and checked my seatbelt and the door’s lock. As we crawled past him, I saw he was standing in front of a man who lay crumpled on the road — obviously just hit by a car. “He must be dead.” Welcome to Kenya, I thought.
Despite a 25-hour series of sleepless flights, my night in the hotel was not restful. I awoke the next day and my driver took me along backroads lined with embassies and ambassador’s residences (and the occasional cow and chicken) to the United Nations compound. The UN compound is enormous — an island of landscaping in a disordered city and region. Across the street was the massive US embassy, which looked a bit like the twenty-first century’s version of a medieval fortress. It was a building crouched in a defensive posture behind a lot of guards, high walls, and a lot of wire. Big signs warned you away from taking photos. I walked past one UN checkpoint, then through a metal detector, then on to another building. A woman checked my passport and found my name on a list; she handed over a nametag.
There was a long walk to another building, which itself sprawled across the grounds and down a hill. Given the warmth here a few degrees latitude below the equator, the buildings here were mainly designed for shade and air circulation — almost every door was open to the exterior or a breezeway. I was pointed down some stairs and past a watergarden, then into a large, high meeting room. Windows for the translators were above me and video cameras were being tested; a large projection screen leaned over the chairman’s table. U-shaped rows of desks came out from center, with country names in the inner rows and non-governmental organizations (like mine) on the outer rows. I sat down at the desk where my organization’s name card had been placed. I had two chairs, a microphone, and a headset for translations.
The meeting began officially about an hour later. I was there at the invitation of the Danish government, which had started an initiative in the last half of 2008 to develop to focus attention on climate adaptation in advance of the UN’s December 2009 climate change meeting in Copenhagen. Countries that sponsor such meetings (called councils or conventions of the parties or “CoPs,” as with Ramsar) have special privileges for introducing pet issues, and Denmark was apparently concerned that the climate adaptation would be discussed next December in an overly narrow way.
I shared their concern. Each of the UNFCCC CoPs — the December meeting will be the 15th to date — has a reasonably clear agenda for discussion in advance. Probably more than 90 percent of CoP15 will focus on climate mitigation (i.e., the reduction of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere) and attempt to produce an updated and more comprehensive version of the Kyoto Protocol. However, there is also a great deal of attention being paid to the creation of a UNFCCC “adaptation fund” (which is usually just referred to as “the adaptation fund” even though there are now many adaptation funds that are now emerging). The UNFCCC adaptation fund is intended to be a new global institution (or “mechanism”) where nations such as the U.S. and most of western Europe can deposit funds that reflect their historic responsibility for most of the climate change that has occurred to date, which will inordinately affect the less-developed nations and poorer people on the planet. The adaptation fund will basically consist of guilt money from rich countries.
Both topics are critical issues that need to be resolved, but my personal feeling is that (a) there are a lot of other sources of adaptation funds and national adaptation policies that are emerging right now (even in the U.S., as discussed here) that need to reference some international consensus-based guidelines on what good climate adaptation looks like, and (b) that adaptation work cannot wait to begin until additional funding is in place. There is much work that needs to begin now, without waiting for the UNFCCC fund, which is likely to take some time to begin writing checks. The Danish government added a third concern: almost a decade passed between the time that the Kyoto Protocol emerged from the CoP process and the time when the Protocol was finally ratified and went into effect, so developing clear guidelines on climate adaptation should be viewed as a long-term process that should be started sooner than later.
At least some members of the Danish delegation also had another motive: that most of the work of climate-ready sustainable development was about freshwater adaptation, even though the title of the draft principles was about land and water adaptation.
The Nairobi meeting began quite dramatically, with a moving talk by Achim Steiner, the current head of the United Nations Environment Program. UNEP is based in Nairobi and has been active in developing a major new global adaptation network (I was at the organizing session for this network in Korea in October 2008, which I will describe in another entry). This network effort is being led by Ibrahim Thiaw with UNEP’s Division of Environmental Policy Implementation, and Thiaw also gave a very moving talk. Like Denmark, UNEP clearly sees climate change as a significant threat to the way it does business and feels a pressing need for connecting the many disparate efforts to encompass and reorganize conservation and development work. They’ve been working with our organization, hoping to build on our network of climate adaptation projects and training globally.
A long series of responses by the various government representatives began — at least a dozen at the ministerial level. Europe and Africa were particularly well represented, but there were a smattering of Asian and Latin American nations there. The U.S. had a paper sign in front of an empty seat, which was very disappointing to me as a U.S. citizen.
The afternoon was spent in a series of interventions (formally raised points) about the guiding principles text at hand. The Danes had produced these principles through a series of discussions and workshops and an excellent site documenting the process. Though quite general, the Danes focused on five major topics: development is necessary and should be sustainable, climate adaptation should begin now and focus on building resilience to climate impacts, resource management institutions need to be strengthened and made into instruments of climate adaptation, access to data and analyses about resource management should be freely available and accessible to a wide range of groups, and finance for climate adaptation should be increased and made available soon.
These five principles are, in truth, very difficult to disagree with. I believe they are more akin to value judgments or qualities of good adaptation rather than principles. My personal contribution was to shift the name of the first clause from “The Development Principle” to “The Sustainable Development Principle”; I introduced some other interventions to change the wording of on the process of adaptation and on water management (not just mentioning the need for increased water storage but also the necessity of attending to water demand and water-use efficiency more broadly) were not approved, vetoed by a major global financial institution behind the scenes, apparently. There was also a long discussion of whether or not these five principles were, in fact, “principles” and how they fit with other international statements about climate adaptation. Would calling them principles interfere with their acceptance in December? There seemed to be consensus that principle was the most useful and accurate term. We adjourned, and the leadership team went off to revise the statement for the next day’s session. For all intents and purposes, the negotiation process was over, at least publically.
The following morning was more ceremonial. A number of government ministers gave formal statements supporting the consensus version of what we were all now calling the Nairobi Statement and Guiding Principles (final PDF version of the text available here). The Danish minister chaired this process. Steiner spoke again. The U.S. representative managed to show up after lunch, giving a flacid statement out of context with everything else said. And then a series of non-ministerial groups began delivering their statements.
These groups were a mix of intergovernmental groups such as the Nile and Mekong river commissions, the World Health Organization, and the World Meteorological Organization, as well as non-governmental organizations (or civil-society organizations, depending on your reference term). My group (WWF) was in this category, as well as IUCN, SIWI, and IISD. The Danes had asked me to provide a strong focusing statement for the end, so I spoke last of this mixed group. My statement is available here. I was pleased to make the Danish minister laugh a little.
Following my talk, the Danes gave a ceremonial award to Steiner on behalf of UNEP’s efforts on climate adaptation. Steiner was pretty surprised to be confronted with a burning torch, and he seemed relieved to pass the torch (quite literally) to an assistant who could put out the large flame quietly in the hallway. The formal meeting was over and we began to say goodbye.
What happens next? The December meeting is preceded by a series of meetings in Bonn, Germany, that are intended to refine the agenda for CoP15. The second of these meetings occurs in early June, where the Danes creating a spearhead group of water organizations to forge a set of water-sector adaptation principles, built at least in part on the set that I put together with a colleague. As well as principles produced by IWA/UNESCO-IHE and GPPN.
There is a strong hope that we can achieve two major goals in December in the small space not covered by climate mitigation and adaptation finance. First, we hope to have the UNFCCC acknowledge that the water sector will be the primary instrument of human climate adaptation. Second, we want to have our Nairobi Guiding Principles be adopted as a formal aspect of the UNFCCC. These are modest goals, but I hope they will help us begin to move beyond Copenhagen and begin to support project-based climate adaptation work more widely.
I walked to the entrance of the UN compound, texting my driver that I was ready to go back to the hotel. I stood in the sun late on a Friday afternoon, watching the UN’s staff leave work for the weekend. Watching people stroll to their cars, I thought about the brutal beginning to my trip — seeing a poor man die in the road in front of me. I thought about a city of two million people halfway through its rainy season and already experiencing water rationing from its second year of severe drought. And of the millions of even poorer people a little to the north — Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia — confronting extreme, life-threatening water shortages already. A shower suddenly started through sun. The air suddenly smelled cleaner as people waiting for their rides pushed up against me under the eaves. The high clouds and big sky suddenly reminded me of my native Texas, which is experiencing its worst drought in more than half a century. In spite of the grim thoughts, the sky was so beautiful... I hoped we had done something helpful here.
We drove a few kilometers, my driver asking about Obama (“He is the first Kenyan president of America!”) and pointing out various landmarks (“This is the famous Uhuru Park”); Dolly Parton sang about estranged love on the minivan’s tape player. Just in front of the football stadium, we saw the outstretched arms of man in the middle of the very dark, unlit road. He wildly tried to direct us around him as we slowed down. I assumed he must be high and checked my seatbelt and the door’s lock. As we crawled past him, I saw he was standing in front of a man who lay crumpled on the road — obviously just hit by a car. “He must be dead.” Welcome to Kenya, I thought.
Despite a 25-hour series of sleepless flights, my night in the hotel was not restful. I awoke the next day and my driver took me along backroads lined with embassies and ambassador’s residences (and the occasional cow and chicken) to the United Nations compound. The UN compound is enormous — an island of landscaping in a disordered city and region. Across the street was the massive US embassy, which looked a bit like the twenty-first century’s version of a medieval fortress. It was a building crouched in a defensive posture behind a lot of guards, high walls, and a lot of wire. Big signs warned you away from taking photos. I walked past one UN checkpoint, then through a metal detector, then on to another building. A woman checked my passport and found my name on a list; she handed over a nametag.
There was a long walk to another building, which itself sprawled across the grounds and down a hill. Given the warmth here a few degrees latitude below the equator, the buildings here were mainly designed for shade and air circulation — almost every door was open to the exterior or a breezeway. I was pointed down some stairs and past a watergarden, then into a large, high meeting room. Windows for the translators were above me and video cameras were being tested; a large projection screen leaned over the chairman’s table. U-shaped rows of desks came out from center, with country names in the inner rows and non-governmental organizations (like mine) on the outer rows. I sat down at the desk where my organization’s name card had been placed. I had two chairs, a microphone, and a headset for translations.
The meeting began officially about an hour later. I was there at the invitation of the Danish government, which had started an initiative in the last half of 2008 to develop to focus attention on climate adaptation in advance of the UN’s December 2009 climate change meeting in Copenhagen. Countries that sponsor such meetings (called councils or conventions of the parties or “CoPs,” as with Ramsar) have special privileges for introducing pet issues, and Denmark was apparently concerned that the climate adaptation would be discussed next December in an overly narrow way.
I shared their concern. Each of the UNFCCC CoPs — the December meeting will be the 15th to date — has a reasonably clear agenda for discussion in advance. Probably more than 90 percent of CoP15 will focus on climate mitigation (i.e., the reduction of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere) and attempt to produce an updated and more comprehensive version of the Kyoto Protocol. However, there is also a great deal of attention being paid to the creation of a UNFCCC “adaptation fund” (which is usually just referred to as “the adaptation fund” even though there are now many adaptation funds that are now emerging). The UNFCCC adaptation fund is intended to be a new global institution (or “mechanism”) where nations such as the U.S. and most of western Europe can deposit funds that reflect their historic responsibility for most of the climate change that has occurred to date, which will inordinately affect the less-developed nations and poorer people on the planet. The adaptation fund will basically consist of guilt money from rich countries.
Both topics are critical issues that need to be resolved, but my personal feeling is that (a) there are a lot of other sources of adaptation funds and national adaptation policies that are emerging right now (even in the U.S., as discussed here) that need to reference some international consensus-based guidelines on what good climate adaptation looks like, and (b) that adaptation work cannot wait to begin until additional funding is in place. There is much work that needs to begin now, without waiting for the UNFCCC fund, which is likely to take some time to begin writing checks. The Danish government added a third concern: almost a decade passed between the time that the Kyoto Protocol emerged from the CoP process and the time when the Protocol was finally ratified and went into effect, so developing clear guidelines on climate adaptation should be viewed as a long-term process that should be started sooner than later.
At least some members of the Danish delegation also had another motive: that most of the work of climate-ready sustainable development was about freshwater adaptation, even though the title of the draft principles was about land and water adaptation.
The Nairobi meeting began quite dramatically, with a moving talk by Achim Steiner, the current head of the United Nations Environment Program. UNEP is based in Nairobi and has been active in developing a major new global adaptation network (I was at the organizing session for this network in Korea in October 2008, which I will describe in another entry). This network effort is being led by Ibrahim Thiaw with UNEP’s Division of Environmental Policy Implementation, and Thiaw also gave a very moving talk. Like Denmark, UNEP clearly sees climate change as a significant threat to the way it does business and feels a pressing need for connecting the many disparate efforts to encompass and reorganize conservation and development work. They’ve been working with our organization, hoping to build on our network of climate adaptation projects and training globally.
A long series of responses by the various government representatives began — at least a dozen at the ministerial level. Europe and Africa were particularly well represented, but there were a smattering of Asian and Latin American nations there. The U.S. had a paper sign in front of an empty seat, which was very disappointing to me as a U.S. citizen.
The afternoon was spent in a series of interventions (formally raised points) about the guiding principles text at hand. The Danes had produced these principles through a series of discussions and workshops and an excellent site documenting the process. Though quite general, the Danes focused on five major topics: development is necessary and should be sustainable, climate adaptation should begin now and focus on building resilience to climate impacts, resource management institutions need to be strengthened and made into instruments of climate adaptation, access to data and analyses about resource management should be freely available and accessible to a wide range of groups, and finance for climate adaptation should be increased and made available soon.
These five principles are, in truth, very difficult to disagree with. I believe they are more akin to value judgments or qualities of good adaptation rather than principles. My personal contribution was to shift the name of the first clause from “The Development Principle” to “The Sustainable Development Principle”; I introduced some other interventions to change the wording of on the process of adaptation and on water management (not just mentioning the need for increased water storage but also the necessity of attending to water demand and water-use efficiency more broadly) were not approved, vetoed by a major global financial institution behind the scenes, apparently. There was also a long discussion of whether or not these five principles were, in fact, “principles” and how they fit with other international statements about climate adaptation. Would calling them principles interfere with their acceptance in December? There seemed to be consensus that principle was the most useful and accurate term. We adjourned, and the leadership team went off to revise the statement for the next day’s session. For all intents and purposes, the negotiation process was over, at least publically.
The following morning was more ceremonial. A number of government ministers gave formal statements supporting the consensus version of what we were all now calling the Nairobi Statement and Guiding Principles (final PDF version of the text available here). The Danish minister chaired this process. Steiner spoke again. The U.S. representative managed to show up after lunch, giving a flacid statement out of context with everything else said. And then a series of non-ministerial groups began delivering their statements.
These groups were a mix of intergovernmental groups such as the Nile and Mekong river commissions, the World Health Organization, and the World Meteorological Organization, as well as non-governmental organizations (or civil-society organizations, depending on your reference term). My group (WWF) was in this category, as well as IUCN, SIWI, and IISD. The Danes had asked me to provide a strong focusing statement for the end, so I spoke last of this mixed group. My statement is available here. I was pleased to make the Danish minister laugh a little.
Following my talk, the Danes gave a ceremonial award to Steiner on behalf of UNEP’s efforts on climate adaptation. Steiner was pretty surprised to be confronted with a burning torch, and he seemed relieved to pass the torch (quite literally) to an assistant who could put out the large flame quietly in the hallway. The formal meeting was over and we began to say goodbye.
What happens next? The December meeting is preceded by a series of meetings in Bonn, Germany, that are intended to refine the agenda for CoP15. The second of these meetings occurs in early June, where the Danes creating a spearhead group of water organizations to forge a set of water-sector adaptation principles, built at least in part on the set that I put together with a colleague. As well as principles produced by IWA/UNESCO-IHE and GPPN.
There is a strong hope that we can achieve two major goals in December in the small space not covered by climate mitigation and adaptation finance. First, we hope to have the UNFCCC acknowledge that the water sector will be the primary instrument of human climate adaptation. Second, we want to have our Nairobi Guiding Principles be adopted as a formal aspect of the UNFCCC. These are modest goals, but I hope they will help us begin to move beyond Copenhagen and begin to support project-based climate adaptation work more widely.
I walked to the entrance of the UN compound, texting my driver that I was ready to go back to the hotel. I stood in the sun late on a Friday afternoon, watching the UN’s staff leave work for the weekend. Watching people stroll to their cars, I thought about the brutal beginning to my trip — seeing a poor man die in the road in front of me. I thought about a city of two million people halfway through its rainy season and already experiencing water rationing from its second year of severe drought. And of the millions of even poorer people a little to the north — Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia — confronting extreme, life-threatening water shortages already. A shower suddenly started through sun. The air suddenly smelled cleaner as people waiting for their rides pushed up against me under the eaves. The high clouds and big sky suddenly reminded me of my native Texas, which is experiencing its worst drought in more than half a century. In spite of the grim thoughts, the sky was so beautiful... I hoped we had done something helpful here.
