Aid Performance and Climate Change

The richer countries spend about US$ 165 billion yearly on overseas aid, mainly to keep human development going. These efforts are undermined by climate change, water-catchment damage, biodiversity loss, and desertification, and their interactions with social systems at all scales, which few aid designs or evaluations fully address. This must change if aid performance is to be improved.

Constraints to be overcome include limited understanding of the very complex systems that aid investments affect, and of the ecology behind climate change adaptation and mitigation. Aid Performance and Climate Change targets these problems and others, by explaining how to use multiple points of view to describe each aid investment as a complex system in its own unique context. With examples throughout, it reviews cases, ideas, and options for mitigation using technology and ecology, and for adaptation by preserving resilience and diversity, while exploring related priorities, treaties, and opportunities.

Combining an empirical, eye-witness approach with methodological conclusions, this book is an essential resource for those looking to improve aid design and evaluation, and will be a necessary tool in training the next generation of aid professionals to respond to the causes and consequences of climate change.

With a background in wildlife management and rainforest conservation, since 2000 Julian Caldecott has evaluated major aid investment programmes for the EC, UK, Norway, Finland, and Switzerland: five donors that together contribute more than a quarter of all official aid. His work focuses on design and performance issues concerning climate change, biodiversity, ecosystem management, and related matters of sustainability and institutional and community development.