Campaigners Attack Uk Government Over Climate Change 'loans'

British plans to offer £800m to poor countries to help prepare for climate change came under renewed fire today from debt campaigners and developing countries. The Guardian revealed on Saturday that most of the money would be in the form of loans and not grants and would be channeled through the World Bank rather than the UN.

"This is extremely regrettable", said Martin Khor, director of Third World Network, a grouping of international development agencies based in Malaysia. "The decision to deliver climate aid in the form of loans and not grants contradicts internationally agreed principles" which state that developed countries should shoulder the main burden for tackling climate change, as they generated the pollution and have higher technological and economic capabilities.

Khor added that the money should be channeled through the UN, rather than the World Bank: "Developing countries have repeatedly argued that any proposed funds for climate change, particularly in such significant amounts, should come under the direction of the state parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"The World Bank's climate investment funds could undermine the UN's negotiations for climate change aid," Khor argued. "It creates parallel structures for financing climate change adaptation and mitigation outside the existing multilateral structures and within a process dominated by the G8 countries."

Nick Reardon, director of the Jubilee debt campaign, an umbrella body of more than 90 organizations in Britain including Oxfam, Comic Relief and Make Poverty History, attacked the government for proposing to increase debt: "The ongoing debt crisis is already hampering poor countries attempts to cope with climate change â€" new loans will only fuel the problem. Rich countries owe poor countries a huge environmental debt â€" but yet again it is the poor who are being asked to pay for the rich world's mistakes".

Environment minister Phil Woolas, and trade and development minister Gareth Thomas, responded in a letter to the Guardian that "new approaches" were needed to fund climate aid: "If we cling to the sort of outdated thinking that implies concessional loans are not helpful for developing countries, we will get nowhere. We need shared innovative approaches that will get money to where it's needed most."