Here in Durban a bunch of campaigners in bright green costumes were warming to the theme. As delegates and journalists made their way to the International Conference Centre at the weekend, they were handed a bow and arrow, and invited to display their archery skills by taking a shot at a green and white bullseye.

Nearly everyone failed to hit the target but were nonetheless  met with cheers from the boisterous young men and women who seemed to be having the time of the lives. The appearance of Naledi Pandor, the South African Minister of Science and Technology of South Africa earned her the Robin Hood Award for the day.

This is how young people  in YOUNGO (Youth Non-Governmental Organizations), a small committee of campaigners under the aegis of the Finance Working Group  raised awareness about the proposed Financial Transaction Tax, popularly known as the Robin Hood Tax. Their target: funding the UN’s Green Climate Fund.

At COP 16 in Cancun, UN parties agreed to the creation of the Green Climate Fund, promising to mobilise US$100 billion by 2020 to mitigate climate change and support adaptation in developing countries.

Under the ‘polluter pays’ principle, developed nations are widely expected to bankroll the fund. However, developed countries have been slow to make good on this promise, claiming the economic crisis means that there just isn’t any money left for climate change.

YOUNGO says a financial transaction tax will go some way to solving this problem.

The proposed ‘micro-tax’ to the order of 0.01 per cent -0.05 per cent would apply to each trade of stocks, derivatives, currency, and other financial instruments. According to YOUNGO this would have ‘no effect on the average person’s transactions like withdrawing money from a bank account’ but instead  offers the twin benefits of raising large amounts of revenue and discouraging high-frequency trading ‘that has little social value but poses big risks to the economy’.

South Africa recently threw its weight behind the proposal at the G20 Summit in Cannes. ‘We are incredibly grateful for their leadership support for FTT, as well as for hosting us in their nation for COP17,’ says the coalition on its website.

But after a week of COP17 negotiations in Durban, the Green Climate Fund remains in limbo. The United States is opposed to the proposed submission of a report on the fund, which would result in it becoming operational.

At a press briefing on Friday, US Deputy Envoy for Climate Change Dr. Jonathan Pershing said inconsistencies in the report and unanswered questions about the relationship between the fund’s board and its relationship with the COP, were among their concerns.

Many here in Durban are worried the Green Climate Fund will unravel should the US continue to push for details to be renegotiated. This is why, despite YOUNGO’s merriment, a cloud of gloom hung over Durban at the weekend – the Green Climate Fund may just fall prey to the high-wire politics that created it in the first place.

Right now as she toils hard to prepare her land for the growing season amid uncertainty about what the changing climate will bring, some of her countrywomen have adopted another strategy to attain food security.

Eunice Chipengule and 13 other women have travelled from Malawi to Durban for the UN climate change conference underway here so they can lobby for change.

“I thought I needed to be here in Durban with my fellow women farmers so that together we send a message to the leaders about our concerns,” says Chipengule, a smallholder farmer from Kasungu.

She is optimistic that despite abandoning her farm to come to Durban her trip will yield positive results, as it is her chance to tell rich countries to reduce carbon emissions and contribute handsomely to funds that will help farmers like her adapt to the changing climate.

“It is very frustrating to buy seeds, sow them, apply manure or fertilizer when at the end of the day everything is washed away due to floods,” says Chipengule. “If it is not the floods, then it will be drought which dries up three quarters of what you planted.”

Making money matter
Despite assurances from Malawi’s Meteorological and Climate Change Department that the country will have sufficiently normal rains, droughts and floods have become common, and farmers are having second thoughts about sowing their hard earned and expensive hybrid seeds.

Meanwhile, at the conference in Durban there are growing calls for international donors to do more to enable farmers like Chipengule and Magombo to protect their farms from climatic threats.

Women produce 80 per cent of the food in developing nations, according to a presentation made in Durban by Lorena Aguilar, the global senior gender advisor at the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

IUCN and GenderCC Southern Africa say women farmers should get the lion’s share of donor funds for adaptation to climate change because compared to men, women tend to have more limited access to resources — including land, credit, agricultural inputs, decision-making bodies, technology and training services — that could help them to adapt.

Nongovernmental organisation Self Help Africa says the simple act of getting more money into the hands of Africa women farmers of Africa could boost food production on the continent.

It is not calling for new funds but urging donors to reserve for women a fair share of their existing budgets for agricultural development in Africa.

“African women currently receive as little as 5 per cent of the available supports — training, access to inputs, to land, and to farm credit,” reads a petition the organisation will send to US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, UK Minister for International Development Andrew Mitchell and other senior policymakers.

Lorena Aguilar of IUCN, which is among the organisations that have signed the petition, agrees: “Equalizing access to productive resources for female and male farmers could increase agricultural output in developing countries by as much as 2.5 to 4 per cent and reduce the number of undernourished people by 12 to 17 per cent.”

The donor persective

But the global financial crisis means that some donors could cut their funding to developing nations, thereby frustrating the women’s demands for more support, says Rachel Kyte, the World Bank Vice President for the Sustainable Development Network.

Kyte said the World Bank would aim to fill any gaps, and was encouraging banks and companies that lease farm equipment to provide more support to women farmers in Africa.

“We are working with Exim Bank in Tanzania and Access Bank in Nigeria to soften up their conditions towards women so that as many as can should have access to bank loans,” says Kyte. “The problem is in most African set-ups, women do not have assets which they can use as surety.”

In a remote area of Chakwal district, Pakistan, farmers are running out of water. In this short film, the farmers describe the changes they have witnessed and politicians outline their hopes for the Green Climate Fund being negotiated at the UN COP 17.

The accelerating need for action and agreement is at odds with the pace of the negotiations.  Just last week, the IPCC released a report that further confirms the risks and costs associated with climate change. Even so, expectations for this year’s UN conference are mixed. Ernst and Young reports that ‘the majority of business executives see binding international agreements on emissions cuts as essential, but few believe it will happen in Durban.’

So, why is COP17 important?

Climate Action Network hosted a call with NGO leaders last week which highlighted four reasons:

1.     The Kyoto Protocol is not the end game.

There is a risk that the Kyoto Protocol, the UN’s first ambitious attempt to secure multilateral commitment on GHG reductions, might collapse. Yet for many insiders, the Kyoto Protocol is not the end all. The focus has shifted to building a framework that better enables agreement. According to several NGO leaders, the Cancun talks successfully laid the foundation for such a framework. “We are not going to get a treaty in Durban,” states Lou Leonard, leader of Climate Change at WWF flatly. “It’s more important now that we lay out a road map and a mandate by which we will get agreement.”  There is clear recognition that such a road map – with financing, technology and other considerations – will require more cross-sector effort and more than just government investments. As for the Protocol, the real risk is perceived collapse of climate change negotiations.

2.     COP17 will be ‘The Finance Talks’.

Past COPs have made it clear that establishing funding parameters and identifying funding sources for clean energy, emission mitigation, and adaptation is critical. COP 17 will focus on the Green Climate Fund. The Fund is intended to finance climate change action, both adaptation and mitigation, in developing countries. It is an important signal for the private sector. Industry leaders will be looking to see whether government leaders can establish infrastructure for the Fund and secure agreement as to funding sources.

3.     The world is watching the US.

Last year, the two world leaders, the US and China, were bickering about transparency and accountability. According to NRDC’s Jake Schmidt, the dynamic this year is different.  “There is more constructive dialogue between the two countries.”

This year, the world is very much watching the US. The question: will the US show that it has a plan to reduce emissions and to act on the country’s commitments? In the lead up to COP, Obama’s decisions on two relevant issues – the Keystone Pipeline and emissions standards for power plants – signal what might be expected from the US in Durban. What happens in the US matters greatly to these international talks, and similarly what happens in Durban matters domestically.

4.     Business leaders are increasingly involved – across sectors and continents.

Industry leaders are increasingly involved in the COP talks. As clean energy deployments in over 80 countries have skyrocketed, clean energy suppliers and adopters need assurance that governments will support this market. In addition, COP 17 will work to establish a technology center that will serve as a hub for leveraging and deploying climate monitoring, management and adaptation solutions in different countries. This will require significant collaboration with technology and information industry leaders.

The net of it is COP17 does matter. It matters because global warming is becoming a more pressing global problem that the world community must work together to address. The US remains a global and industry powerhouse whose actions and example are of critical import. And, it’s clear that industry must play a role in providing leadership, technology, and financing innovations.

Elias Be Cituk, 56, is chief of a Mayan community five hours’ drive south of Cancun. Speaking in the early stages of the 2010 UN climate conference, he had high hopes of an agreement at the negotiations on REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation).

An international scheme which seeks to attribute financial value to the carbon stored in forests, REDD+ aims to offer incentives to developing countries to reduce carbon emissions from forested lands and to invest in low-carbon paths to sustainable development.

The “+” signifies that the scheme reaches beyond deforestation and forest degradation, and includes the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests and the enhancement of forest carbon stocks.

Elias is the president of Felipe Carrillo Puerto, an “ejido” or village in the centre of the state of Quintana Roo where people share ownership of the community’s land. The ejido’s forest is shared by its 251 Mayan residents, some of whom say they have known great disappointment in working to care for their trees.

A 72-year-old forester, Dionisio Yam Moo, said some “big companies” had approached the ejido in 1998 and persuaded the villagers to cut down the forest, with a promise that they would plant fruit trees where the forest had once stood. Hectares of trees were felled, but the companies broke their word and no fruit trees ever came.

Fortunately, Felipe Carrillo Puerto started a trial of a REDD+ project in 2006. It attracted support from organisations such as USAID, WWF, the UN Development Programme and Mexican sponsors. Elias says how satisfied he is with the project because “it changed the situation for the better”.

The community has already planted 60 hectares of trees, says Sebastian Proust, a Frenchman who works on the programme and lives locally. The concept is that as the trees store carbon dioxide while they are growing, that will give the villagers credits to sell on the international carbon market.

“When the scheme achieves certification the community wants to plant 50 hectares a year for ten years”, Sebastian says. “One tree can offset an average of 1.6 tonnes of CO2, which can be sold for US $12. That means one hectare could capture 196 tonnes of CO2 in 25 years, and the community’s revenue would greatly increase”.

“And don’t forget,” he adds, “the community has a holistic view of this work. They are working with carbon credits, but they also sell wood, palm, ecotourism and other forest products. Carbon offsets are just one activity.”

In fact the villagers have gained something already. To develop the project the community received an average of $40,000 a year from funders and used the money for training, research, communication, sampling and some pilot reforestation.

But the project does have its doubters. “Mexico is a big country and such a project can make little difference, given the worsening environment of the country,” said Chan Chong, a Chinese environmental activist who attended the Cancun conference. “And how to use the money effectively is very important.”

It is a pilot project and so it does make mistakes, says Sebastian. “For instance, at the beginning of the project, people planted some species like mahogany that can grow in shade. It was an error, and it has been corrected. It’s a process of learning from success and failure.”

He thinks the project is meaningful. “In terms of knowledge, it is really useful. This year, we are expanding, thanks to what Felipe Carrillo Puerto has taught us,” he says.

Be Cituk also thinks the project has been a success because it helps not only the well-being of the community, but also the preservation of the forest. That in turn helps the Mayan people keep their traditional lifestyle and values intact.

But he has his worries. A Mayan prophecy says the world will end on 23 December next year. Be Cituk says: “I don’t worry about the prophecy of the end of time in 2012. My worry is that if the international community cannot develop a system to help us save our trees, the forest and our lifestyle will be under severe threat.”

“We are hoping that Cancun can come up with a plan to save the forests and help us to preserve them. We are willing to help, but it’s hard to do it by ourselves.”

His hopes were realised – up to a point.  The conference did agree to boost action to curb emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries with technological and financial support. Now for the action itself.

For countries like Colombia — which began 2011 in a flood-induced state of emergency — the stakes are high. It is trying to convince the world that many climate-vulnerable people risk being left out when the climate finance starts to flow.

“People are negotiating with their blood because this is the negotiation of survival,” said Paula Caballero, a member of Colombia’s negotiating team, on the last day of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) summit in Cancún last year. “That is why it is so difficult to get an agreement.”

After two weeks of intense work and little sleep, Caballero’s voice was weak and her eyes were red, but she spoke enthusiastically about the way Colombia’s had brought together a new group of “most vulnerable” countries.

The group’s aim is to draw attention to the threats climate change poses to its members so they can argue that they should receive some of US$100 billion a year that industrialised nations agreed to provide by 2020 under the UNFCCC’s Cancún Agreements.

Before Cancún, the UNFCCC had specifically identified only the 50 Least Developed Countries and the 52 Small Island Developing States as priorities for financial support from the industrialised nations.

A spokesperson for the Alliance of Small Island States said the media was not the right place for a debate about which countries are the most vulnerable to climate change.

“All countries are vulnerable to climate change, some more so than others,” they said “The extent of national vulnerability depends not only on the exposure to climate change impacts, but also on internal national policies, stage of development, access to resources, and the like — what we call adaptive capacity.”

The spokesperson added: “The [UNFCCC] negotiations have historically prioritized those countries with the lowest adaptive capacity as being among the most vulnerable, like the Small Island Developing States and the Least Developed countries”.

But Colombia argues that other countries are also highly vulnerable and, in Cancún, other countries agreed. Guatemala, El Salvador, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, the Philippines, Tajikistan and Venezuela all joined the Colombian initiative.

“The group of the most vulnerable is not about exclusion but about inclusion, about recognizing our vulnerability”, said Caballero.

Paola Bernal, another Colombian delegate, explained: “The idea is to use scientific criteria to determine vulnerability, and not only give priority to the island states or the least developed countries.”

Few Colombians need reminding of their nation’s vulnerability to extreme climatic events. Last year brought the heaviest rains in Colombia’s history and effects of flooding and landslides are still being felt today.

More than two million people have been affected by the floods, and many towns and roads are still under water. The Colombian government says the floods have caused US$5 billion of damage

Despite this, some analysts say that, as a middle-income country, Colombia has a better capacity to respond than the poorest nations. The Climate Vulnerability Monitor 2010, which ranks countries on five point scale according to their vulnerability (low, moderate, high, severe and acute), classifies Colombia’s vulnerability as merely moderate.

But Colombia insists that although it is not one of the poorest nations, an increase in the extreme weather events will reduce its capacity to respond.

“Our call is about the impacts climate change is generating in many countries,” explained Caballero, adding that the scientific reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict very dramatic outcomes but also include a lot of uncertainty. “We don’t know where exactly climate change is going to impact but we are already feeling its effects in many places, like in Colombia.”

Disagreements about the definition of vulnerability meant that the final text agreed in Cancun did not specify which countries would be first in line for the money, so the fight to access the funding will be sure to surface again at the UNFCCC’s next annual conference in Durban, South Africa, at the end of this year.

At last month’s climate-change conference in Cancún, Indonesia claimed it had not received any of the US$30 billion of ‘fast-start funding’ that industrialised nations promised to help developing nations reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change, but the donors begged to differ.

At the previous conference, in Copenhagen in 2009, the industrialised countries pledged to provide US$30 billion between 2010 and 2012 and US$100 billion a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries.

In Cancún,  officials from the European Union (EU) said it had fulfilled its promise by providing money — in the form of loans, grants or debt-swap programs — to fund climate change mitigation and adaptation projects, including some in Indonesia.

Peter Wittoeck, the head of Belgium’s delegation to the EU said: “The EU mobilized ‘fast-start funding’ of 2.2 billion euros in 2010”. Overall, the EU, consisting of 27 member states, has committed to supply 7.2 billion euros within between 2010 and 2012, mainly to the most vulnerable countries.

To convince developing nations about its claim, the EU launched its 2010 report on fast-start funding, which details the countries and programs funded with money from the EU member states. About half of this funding has been in the form of loans or equity investments while the remaining 48 percent was in grants.

Environmental organizations criticized the EU, saying that loans would be an unfair burden for developing countries as they had not caused the problem of climate change but would experience its effects. The activists also said that the funds focused more on reducing greenhouse gas emissions rather than on adaptation, which they say is the more urgent priority in developing nations.

Artur Runge-Metzger, head of the European Commission delegation in Cancún, defended the use of loans, saying that they can help low-income people to afford measures such as building insulation, which pays for itself via lower heating bills.

“It is a revolving fund. You insulate your house and you save the money and then the fund can be lent to someone else,” he said.

The report said that EU money had funded eight climate change projects in Indonesia.

The government of Finland provided a grant of 4 million euros for mitigation in the energy sector, including a program to promote renewable energy in Indonesia. France channeled a 142 million euro loan to Indonesia, also for a climate-change mitigation project.

Italy gave 30 million euros in a debt-swap for Indonesia’s REDD program — which aims to reduce emissions by avoiding deforestation — and the UK supplied a 1.71 million euro grant for mitigation under the Indonesian low-carbon growth project.

Indonesian negotiators in Cancún said developing nations wants rich countries to provide “new and additional” funds for climate change — as they pledged in Copenhagen –  instead of recycling funds from existing development budgets.

“We want the money to come from a new source, not an existing official development assistance program because that would be double counting,” said Indonesian negotiator Tazwin Hanif.

The EU said however that there was no common definition of “new and additional”.