New Zealand Aid to Vanuatu post-cyclones Judy and Kevin. Photo: RNZ Pacific / Hilaire Bule
An academic assessing the value of aid programmes is accusing New Zealand of intending to "cook the books" on its planned aid spending.
Writing in NZADDs, or the New Zealand Aid Dialogues, Terence Wood, who is with the Australian National University, said Aotearoa is planning to trim back its aid spending and will incorporate much more of its climate change commitments into those aid programmes.
New Zealand is one of several countries that have previously made strong commitments that their climate aid will be new and additional to other assistance provided.
RNZ Pacific spoke with Terence Wood.
(The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.)
Don Wiseman: New Zealand, along with a number of other developed countries, told the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2009 that they would scale up, there would be new and additional funding provided to developing countries, to enable and support enhanced action on mitigation and adaptation for climate change. Is New Zealand keeping that promise?
Terence Wood: It was a good promise to try and keep, right? It is the least we could do in a world where the climate is changing. Developing countries are going to need increasing assistance to adapt to climate change.
Once upon a time, particularly under the previous government, we were keeping to that promise. We were giving new and additional climate finance, in particular, we were increasing our aid budget to take into account our rising climate finance spend.
Now, however, it really looks like we are going to cut our aid budget, and that is going to cause our climate finance to fall, and we are going to try and cover that up by reporting to the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development) that an increasing share of our aid projects - projects that have nothing to do with the climate or very little to do with climate change - are actually climate change related.
DW: So how do they get away with that?
TW: Well, the whole system is based on reporting to the OECD, that's based on self reporting, and particularly with one type of climate aid. The definition is fairly fuzzy, so that provides donors with a lot of leeway to claim that projects are climate related, even when the connection is fairly tenuous, and you can't be too brazen.
However, if you are a donor, you just have to weave a little bit to do with climate change into your report to the OECD to be able to claim the project is climate change related.
DW: So where is New Zealand doing this, and what sort of projects?
TW: Well, we do not know yet. Unfortunately, New Zealand is not very transparent about its aid or at least about its plans for its future aid spending.
So we can look at existing projects or projects from a couple of years ago, and we can see which ones we are claiming are climate change related.
However, we do not know what is going to happen to projects in the future, or we do not know what is going to happen to any particular project in the future. We just know that there is going to be a broad change.
DW: So it is sort of supposition on your part that the government is going to be going down this road?
TW: Yeah, supposition based on both the projected aid budget, which comes from Treasury documents, and also based on what MFAT has said to NGOs and also some of the comments made in the recently released review or internal review of New Zealand aid.
DW: What have MFAT said?
TW: Well, they hae said that a rapidly increasing percentage of our aid projects will have to have something to do with climate change, and that is one way of keeping your nominal climate finance commitment up, whilst at the same time letting your overall budget fall.
It is not new and additional, though, right? Because if it were going to be new and additional, additional funding, our aid budget would have to increase.
DW: And so the aid budget itself is coming down. So who's suffering there?
TW: The sense I get - and once again, it is always hard to know because it is pretty opaque - is that the fall in our aid budget come primarily from the aid that we give to countries outside of the Pacific and outside of Southeast Asia, and also the aid that we give to multilateral organisations.
To be clear here, I have talked about the sort of dubious reporting practice. Well, that is going to have to be something that occurs in the our aid projects that do continue. And so that will be something that will affect the Pacific.
I think primarily we were going to try and claim that aid projects have got something to do with climate change, even when they do not, or even when the connection is very tenuous.
DW: Now this government, of course, is very keen to cut back spending for, I guess, fairly obvious reasons. You would expect them to be cutting across the board in these ways, wouldn't you?
TW: Well, they shouldn't be, because aid is only about 1% of total government spending. So you can increase aid without really having a major impact on overall government spending. And what's more, at this point in time, with the United States dramatically slashing its aid budget, and with aid from the United Kingdom, which is another major donor, falling rapidly, the need for our assistance is greater than ever before. And of course, the effects of climate change are increasingly being felt as well. So the need for our assistance in this area is greater than ever before. So if we were a responsible global citizen, we wouldn't be letting our aid budget fall right now.
RNZ Pacific asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to respond to the views here.
An MFAT spokesperson gave this somewhat contradictory response: "If your question is about what happens from here: Any future climate finance commitment beyond 2025 is yet to be determined by the Government.
"Process-wise, we are not making changes to the way we count climate finance, but we are trying to improve how we do this.
"We've asked our larger NGO partners to ensure that their programmes aim to be climate 'significant' at a minimum. We've also signalled that rather than holding separate contracts with NGOs for climate finance funding, we will expect it to be mainstreamed."
