House of Commons International Development Select Committee Inquiry

 

Written evidence on longer-term implications of the Covid19 crisis submitted by the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD)

 

About CAFOD

  1. CAFOD is the official aid agency for the Catholic Church in England and Wales; part of the global Caritas confederation of national organisations, each governed by their national Bishop’s conference and linked to national Catholic commissions on health, education and peace/justice issues. CAFOD partners with diverse local NGOs, including both faith-based groups and others working on human rights and other issues regardless of religion or culture. 

 

  1. As was historically the case in the UK, the Church and faith-based groups play a huge role in the provision of health, education and other services across much of the developing world. Local religious leaders and faith groups have an unparalleled level of respect and trust amongst crisis-affected communities staying with them before, during and after crises strike. CAFOD’s mission centres values of compassion, solidarity and hope across our humanitarian, development and peacebuilding work.

 

Executive Summary

 

  1. CAFOD focuses its submission to the second wave of the IDC Inquiry on the longer-term implications of the UK’s response, bilaterally and with the international community, to the spread of coronavirus to developing countries. Our priority recommendations to the British Government are as follows:

 

A transformative approach to promote local leadership of humanitarian action:

  1. Prioritise localisation in DFID’s global humanitarian and resilience policy and funding; and integrate mandatory localisation requirements into all future humanitarian and resilience funding to both NGOs and UN (eg support for organisational overheads costs of national/local partners; effective partnership models for programme and consortia  decision-making; and tracking the quantity and quality of funding to national/local partners).
  1. Scale-up funding to longer-term (3 year +) programmes to strengthen capacities of local civil society on resilience and humanitarian preparedness, response and recovery; building on learning from the Covid19 response and other relevant programming. 
  2. Scale-up support to global and country-level partnerships between humanitarian agencies, faith-based organisations and local NGOs representing women, people living with disability, refugees and other marginalised sections of the crisis-affected community.
  3. Invest in multi-country learning and capacity-strengthening programmes to generate new models for promoting, institutionalising and scaling-up locally-led approaches to safeguarding, inclusion and wider accountability to affected populations. 
  4. Review food security interventions with attention to support for subsistence farmers, small-scale food producers and cooperatives as part of wider market-based approaches to response and recovery; and inclusion and accountability in cash assistance and social protection interventions through government and other agencies.
  5. Review ways to scale-up support for, and draw learning from, environmental mainstreaming and ‘Nature Based Solutions’ approaches to the crisis response (eg support to home kitchens and open pollinated seed varieties).

 

Protecting Human Rights Defenders and Civil Society Space:

  1. Use diplomatic channels to speak out in support of people who are being threatened, criminalised and attacked, and continue to use UK ODA to support local civil society groups and strengthen civil society space.
  2. Work with other governments at national level and at the UN, including supporting Special Procedures, to tackle impunity and ensure that citizens can access justice if they are threatened or attacked.

 

Tackling debt postponement and cancellation in the global financial response

  1. As a major shareholder in the World Bank and IMF, the UK should pressure them to use their own resources, including the IMF’s gold reserves, to suspend all debt repayments in 2020 and 2021.
  2. The UK should also support the United Nations to oversee a systematic process which enables developing countries to bring their debt down to sustainable levels, through planned restructuring and overall debt cancellation. 
  3. At home, the UK should pass legislation to prevent private creditors under UK jurisdiction from suing developing countries for non-payments of debt. This can build on the precedent of the 2010 Developing Countries (Debt Relief) Act to enable borrowing countries to suspend private debt payments without fear of being sued.

 

Just Green Recovery:

  1. The UK should not provide further support for fossil fuel development and instead use the recovery to scale up support for a just energy transition to renewable and efficient energy systems globally. This should include support for any UK workers impacted by this transition.
  2. The UK should ensure all its support is aligned with a climate resilient, inclusive recovery across aid, trade and any other financing and policy support, and through bilateral and multilateral channels. The UK’s diplomatic outreach with peer donor countries including in the G7, G20 and in its role as co-host of the COP26 Climate Summit should also be aligned with this objective, including exploring new forms of carbon tax. 
  3. Drawing on the experience of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Business Conduct, the UK government should develop a new law on mandatory environmental and human rights due diligence to support responsible business practices in operations and global supply chains and help prevent future abuses.
  4. The UK Government must address the role that the current food system has in this pandemic through the destruction of natural habitats from intensive agriculture and livestock practices. COVID-19 is likely a zoonotic disease, passed from animals to humans. Zoonotic diseases are more likely when animals and humans are in closer contact, e.g. through habitat loss and deforestation. Any future UK ODA approach to agricultural transformation in the global South must have a triple focus of protecting nature, tackling poverty and tackling climate change 
  5. Ensure the UK’s climate and nature funds are transformative: with an increased focus on nature-based solutions for climate change, poverty reduction with a sensitivity to the priorities of both national governments and local communities

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A transformative approach to promote local leadership of humanitarian action:

 

  1. The Covid19 crisis has brought into sharp relief the international community’s slow progress on finding timely, adequate and responsive ways to fund and partner with national and local organisations at the frontlines. In the words of Mark Lowcock, UN Emergency Response Coordinator: “Especially as COVID-related operational restrictions make movement and access more challenging, national and local NGOs will become even more critical to our work. Without NGOs, we simply would not be able to reach the millions of people who need humanitarian assistance around the world."[1] Yet as of 6th May 2020, CAFOD analysis of data available on the OCHA Financial Tracking System indicated that only 0.1 percent of funding to the UN’s global Covid19 appeal had been allocated to national and local NGOs.[2]

 

  1. DFID officials have also acknowledged that the response will depend to an unprecedented extent on national and local NGOs. Notwithstanding this, DFID’s own written input to the ‘first wave’ of this committee’s inquiry did not mention civil society once in its section on the UK’s response. As such, the Covid19 crisis should become a wake-up call to redouble efforts on localisation of humanitarian action for DFID and others both during the crisis, but also for post-crisis recovery and the longer-term. 

 

  1. At the time of drafting this submission, UN heads of agency had recognised that the UN system was failing to get funding to NGO efforts, and had tasked an Inter-Agency Standing Committee working-group on funding to identify options to address this. Options being discussed include:
    1. Bilateral donors, like DFID, increasing funds to global or country NGO consortia 
    2. Establishing new UN Country-Based Pooled Funds
    3. UN agencies providing adequate coverage of organisational overheads and longer-term, more flexible funding for NGOs

 

  1. If the UK wants to be at the cutting-edge of international development and humanitarian policy and practice, then a radical new approach to empowering national and local civil society should be front and centre. Wider debates about shifting international cooperation ‘beyond aid’ or resilience and early action, early warning in the face of climate crises will amount to nothing if there is no shift in power and resources to local groups working at the frontlines of crises. This is true of the Covid19 crisis, and will be true for future emergencies. Looking forward, CAFOD proposes the following priorities to deliver this:

 

Integrate mandatory metrics on support to national/local partners into humanitarian funding

 

  1. So far, DFID has released one funding call for NGOs, the Rapid Response Framework (RRF). As highlighted in our first submission to this Inquiry, the level of funding to NGOs through was disappointingly small compared to DFID’s funding to the UN system and was stretched across 15 contexts. However, CAFOD strongly welcomes that this RRF (a first for this DFID funding mechanism) included two explicit requirements of applicants to demonstrate how they will fund national and local NGOs (ie requiring applicants to provide equal overhead costs to their local partners, and to track the level of funding to local partners). These requirements are an important first step in factoring localisation into DFID’s funding. 

 

  1. It would be helpful if the IDC could assess how these localisation metrics were weighted in decision-making on which agencies received funding. All future NGO funding should include and build on these requirements. The same requirements should also be extended to UN agencies, who until now receive funding with no apparent consequences from DFID if they fail to deliver on commitments to strengthen locally-led humanitarian response. 

 

Recommendation:

  1. Prioritise localisation in DFID’s global humanitarian and resilience policy and funding; and integrate mandatory localisation requirements into all future humanitarian and resilience funding to both NGOs and UN (eg support for organisational overheads costs of national/local partners; effective partnership models for programme and consortia  decision-making; and tracking the quantity and quality of funding to national/local partners).

 

Scale-up longer-term support to capacity-strengthening of local civil society as part of a wider ‘whole of society’ approach to emergency preparedness and resilience

 

  1. To enable early warning and early action by local actors in response to future global health pandemics and other major crises, DFID needs to invest in longer-term local capacity-strengthening. Covid19 has shown that local civil society are amongst the critical first responders. It is local civil society at the frontline of informing their communities about the virus and raising awareness about social distancing and hygiene practices. Yet the global humanitarian system – including the UK – is not supporting them in an adequate, timely or effective manner.

 

  1. DFID recognises in principle the need for a ‘whole of society’ approach to early warning, early action in crisis response. One of the UK’s flagship initiatives on climate change and humanitarian action - the ‘Risk Informed Early Action Partnerships’ (REAP) platform - was instigated to catalyse multi-stakeholder efforts on climate-linked crisis preparedness and response. REAP aims to mobilise engagement across donors, governments, UN, private sector, the science community and civil society. Yet whilst high-level political events have been convened to engage other governments and investments into science institutions have been announced, the UK is yet to articulate its approach to supporting civil society engagement in this. 

 

  1. The UK has previous models of support to civil society capacity-strengthening on emergency preparedness and resilience, which could be built on. Key examples include the DFID-funded ‘Disaster and Emergencies Preparedness’ (DEPP) and ‘Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters’ (BRACED) programmes. Both of these proved successful and generated lots of learning, which could inform post-Covid19 efforts. Likewise, the Start Network has proposed an initiative to pilot tiered approaches to compliance and due diligence, which could enable a broader range of local actors to access Start funds. The post-Covid19 recovery, and longer-term resilience and emergency preparedness programmes, would provide opportunities to take these options forward. 

 

Mini-case study: ‘Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters’ programme (BRACED)

 

  1. As a flagship programme under the UK's International Climate Finance, BRACED was designed to tackle a combination of poverty, insecurity, disasters and climate extremes to build the resilience of more than 5 million vulnerable people in the most at-risk areas of South and Southeast Asia, the African Sahel and neighbouring countries. DFID was the major donor to BRACED providing over £110 million, which reached 120 participating organisations.

 

  1. BRACED took an integrative approach, combining climate change, urban resilience, gender and local humanitarian leadership to ensure it convened the right people and knowledge to scale-up and integrate resilience and disaster risk reduction best practice. Whether strengthening the voices of women in Myanmar and Niger through saving and lending groups, or supporting decentralised climate funds (DCF) in Mali and Senegal, the programme was effective in linking central governments with communities to directly build capacity through inclusive planning and local governance. 

 

  1. Evaluations of BRACED highlighted the important role of civil society in bridging national and local levels, thus increasing the chance of transformational change at both levels. Learning also pointed to the importance of holistic and integrated approaches that build community capacity to absorb, adapt and transform in the face of shocks and stresses. Such approaches require flexible and adaptive management, longer term engagement and collaboration across multiple stakeholders with communities at the centre.

 

Recommendation:

  1. Scale-up funding to longer-term (3 year +) programmes to strengthen capacities of local civil society on resilience and humanitarian preparedness, response and recovery; building on learning from the Covid19 response and other relevant programming. 

 

Address gaps in wider humanitarian efforts on localisation; in particular support to local faith-based organisations, women’s groups and disabled peoples’ organisations  

 

  1. The Covid19 response has seen increased discussion amongst international agencies about the importance of engaging religious leaders and faith-based organisations (FBOs). At country-level, some UN agencies have sought to encourage their existing FBO partners to adapt their programmes to Covid19 response, and to mobilise efforts funded by the FBOs’ own internal resources. However, at the time of submitting this input to the Inquiry, there has not been adequate attention to mobilising new funding to support FBOs, and we are yet to see a transformative approach to partnering with local FBOs or engaging a wider range of faith actors on the Covid19 response. 

 

  1. Covid19 - similar to other public health crises like Ebola and SARS - highlights the critical importance of engaging religious leaders and FBOs in the response. It is religious leaders and local FBOs that ‘stay and deliver’ when other humanitarian agencies withdraw from the affected communities. It is religious leaders and FBOs that have the trust and respect of affected communities, and can translate complex health promotion messages into locally-accepted terms. Within the UN system, there are platforms that convene senior UN leadership, academics and selected religious leaders (e.g. the Partnership on Religion and Development, PARD, and UNICEF’s global partnership with Religions For Peace). However, as important as these initiatives can be, they are not primarily led by faith institutions or local FBOs themselves, and have generally limited scope to channel funds or support programming on the ground. Looking forward, DFID needs to find ways to support existing platforms of humanitarian FBOs who have sustained and extensive programmatic partnerships with local religious leaders and local FBOs on the ground. 

 

  1. Other sections of civil society have also faced impediments in engaging with the ‘mainstream’ of the UN, donor and INGO humanitarian system. In particular, local women’s groups, disabled peoples’ organisations and refugee-led civil society networks represent important sections of crisis-affected communities that often struggle to get heard in humanitarian decision-making, programme implementation and accountability. Given the leadership role that DFID has played on gender-based violence (through the ‘Call To Action on Protection From GBV in Emergencies’), disability (through the 2018 Disability Summit) and piloting new approaches to refugee response (linked to the Global Compact on Refugees), the UK is well-placed to scale-up support to such groups, and to require NGOs and UN actors funded by DFID to demonstrate progress on engaging with local groups focused on accountability to women, people living with disability and refugees. 

 

Recommendation:

  1. Scale-up support to global and country-level partnerships between humanitarian agencies, faith-based organisations and local NGOs representing women, people living with disability, refugees and other marginalised sections of the crisis-affected community.

 

Increase support to locally-led initiatives on safeguarding, protection, inclusion and wider accountability to affected communities. 

 

  1. The Covid19 crisis brought to the fore new dynamics in longer-term efforts to address safeguarding and wider inclusion, protection and accountability to affected communities (AAP). Humanitarian agencies have sought to adapt their approaches to community engagement, feedback and accountability given constraints posed by lockdowns and the imperatives of social distancing. 

 

  1. Over recent years, DFID has made important contributions to wider humanitarian efforts on safeguarding and wider accountability to affected communities. Key steps included the convening of the Safeguarding Summit in 2018; and DFID support for the piloting of third-party monitoring and accountability approaches (e.g. support to agencies conducting surveys of crisis-affected communities to gather their views on the quality of assistance). 

 

  1. The challenge which Covid19 brings to the fore is the slow progress made on support to locally-led efforts on safeguarding and wider AAP. Top-down initiatives from aid agency headquarters and donors like DFID has not been matched by a commensurate effort to support locally-led initiatives on these issues. The risk is that this results in a ‘tick box’ approach, whereby local NGO partners of international agencies are expected to develop policies, protocols and mechanisms (eg establishing complaints hotlines), but this has not been packaged with longer-term capacity-strengthening or other kinds of support to address the organisational culture changes required for their effective implementation.

 

Recommendation:

  1. Invest in multi-country learning and capacity-strengthening programmes to generate new models for promoting, institutionalising and scaling-up locally-led approaches to safeguarding, inclusion and wider accountability to affected populations. 

 

Example: Successful emergency capacity-strengthening to national partners in Myanmar

 

  1. The first verified case of Covid19 in Myanmar was identified on 24th March: an individual recently returned from the USA. The village in which this individual lives has a population of 3611 population, which was placed under an immediate and complete lockdown. As nobody was allowed to enter or exit, its population quickly had to cope with the secondary impacts, in particular impacts on food supplies, alongside dealing with the medical response.

 

  1. CAFOD’s national partner NGO, Karuna Mission Social Solidarity (KMSS), was able to ensure that within a week food was being delivered to the village with an adapted system in place to analyse and prioritise on the basis of needs and vulnerabilities (including clear guidance on social distancing and other health promotion measures). This included engagement and support through local diocese level Church aid workers, community volunteers in the village, the Village Development Committee and the local Administrator. This effective response built on years of investment by CAFOD and other partners in support of KMSS’s own efforts to strengthen its humanitarian preparedness and response.

 

  1. Longer-term humanitarian capacity-strengthening support from CAFOD included funding a national Humanitarian Capacity Strengthening Officer based in KMSS’s office over recent years. That individual has provided sustained support to KMSS’s emergency preparedness and humanitarian response work; alongside facilitating wider technical support in other areas (eg financial management, human resources management, risk management). This was packaged with flexible grants to facilitate capacity-sharing with other local organisations and to pilot innovations in their emergency response work (eg new approaches to gathering community feedback and factoring this into response, recovery and preparedness efforts).

 

Prioritising small-scale food producers, inclusion and accountability in efforts on food security

 

  1. “The pandemic is already affecting the entire food system. Restrictions on movement within and across countries can hinder food-related logistic services, disrupt entire food supply chains and affect the availability of food. Impacts on the movement of agricultural labor and on the supply of inputs will soon pose critical challenges to food production, thus jeopardizing food security for all people, and hit especially hard people living in the poorest countries.”[3]

 

  1. CAFOD partners highlight the following areas of priority action on food security in the Covid19 crisis response, which also have clear implications for the recovery and longer-term development phases:

 

a)      Prioritise small-scale food producers and cooperatives in market-based approaches to food security 

 

  1. DFID, alongside other donors and the wider humanitarian sector, has supported the roll-out of global guidance, analysis and programming approaches that promote market-based approaches to food security and livelihoods impacts of crises (eg understanding and addressing impacts of crises on supply chains). CAFOD welcomes these efforts, and supports many of its partners to contribute. 

 

  1. However, CAFOD and its partners believe that evaluations of DFID’s response to the Covid19 crisis should factor in the extent to which these approaches benefit subsistence farmers, small-scale producers and cooperatives, and the implications of this for DFID’s support in both and response and recovery phases. Based on feedback from CAFOD’s partners around the world, we believe priority should be given to creating opportunities for local food producers by incentivising national and regional supply chains. Urgent support is also required to enable small-scale food producers to work safely and effectively given the dynamics that play out in terms of wider emergency measures and health promotion guidance (eg social distancing). This could include designating small-scale food producers and suppliers as ‘key workers’; provision of protective and hygienic items; and support to safe and affordable means of transport so food products can reach local consumers. 

 

  1. In view of wider efforts to innovate on environmental mainstreaming in humanitarian action and ‘Nature Based Solutions’ to crisis response, Covid19 also provides opportunities to support and draw learning from initiatives like home gardens and open pollinated seed varieties (OPV). These can be effective options to support affected communities in the context of lockdowns, but also as environmentally-sensitive programming models to ‘build back better’ in the recovery phase. However OPV are not always available in local markets. In contrast, hybrid seeds - often distributed by humanitarian agencies - do not save and so people either need to keep accessing seed distributions or buying them. So a review of DFID’s support to market-based approaches to Covid19 response could also consider if and how to scale-up support to these approaches.

 

b)      Prioritise inclusion and accountability in Government-centred approaches to social protection

 

  1. International efforts to address both immediate and longer-term development impacts of crises often centre on the role of government; including in relation to food security. CAFOD partners welcome and advocate for responsible government leadership and action to tackle food security impacts of Covid19. However, they also highlight concerns about social inclusion and accountability. Some sections of society (eg people living with HIV, family farmers, indigenous people, fisher folks, mountain farmers and pastoralists) face different forms of discrimination and exclusion, which impede their ability to access cash assistance or other forms of social protection delivered through government and other actors.

 

  1. Recent UN and donor commissioned evaluations of large-scale government-centred social protection approaches to crisis response highlight both strengths and weaknesses in terms of inclusion and accountability. For example, the Inter-Agency Humanitarian Evaluation of the drought response in Ethiopia between 2015 and 2018 highlighted strengths in terms of scale of the response through Government programmes, but also challenges in terms of timeliness, accountability and inclusion.[4]

 

Example: Secondary impacts of the crisis in Zimbabwe 

  1. Prior to the onset of COVID-19, Zimbabwe was already facing a humanitarian emergency due to successive droughts and extreme weather events compounded by economic collapse. It is estimated that over 6 million people are now facing severe hunger.

 

  1. Job losses: Zimbabwe is in the middle of a five-week lockdown. With no furlough schemes, existing social safety nets strained to capacity and with over 80 per cent of people in the informal work sector, millions have been left with no source of income.

 

  1. Food shortages: The price of basic foods has spiked, with the price of the staple ‘mealie-meal’ increasing by over a third in the first week of the lockdown and shortages reported in many areas. This follows months of hyper-inflation where food costs were already rising out of reach for many. Zimbabwe imports much of its food from neighbouring South Africa which is also in lockdown and therefore prices are likely to continue to rise as availability decreases.

 

  1. Covid-19 Response: Our local aid workers, many from Church agencies, were already working to respond to the drought emergency and now they are also responding to the effects of this pandemic. They have been distributing food to some of the worst affected areas, and plan to continue doing so in the coming months. They have also established training on social distancing and hygiene measures.

 

  1. The Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (ZIMCODD), a CAFOD partner, conducted a Twitter Poll and developed recommendations to government; highlighting: “The lack of a clear accountability mechanism in light of COVID-19 resources (mobilised locally or internationally) scares away development partners and further erodes public trust and militates against reducing impact of the pandemic.”

 

Recommendations:

  1. Prioritise support to subsistence farmers, small-scale food producers and cooperatives as part of wider market-based approaches to response and recovery.
  2. Prioritise inclusion and accountability in cash assistance and other social protection interventions through government and other agencies.

 

Protecting Human Rights Defenders and Civil Society Space 

 

  1. There is an urgent need to recognise the impact of the pandemic and national governments’ responses in relation to civil society actors, including environmental and human rights defenders. 

 

  1. Initial indications from our partners, especially in Latin America, show increased risk for local leaders and communities who were already vulnerable to threats and attacks. CAFOD has documented recent cases in Colombia and Guatemala where community partners in remote areas have been threatened or even killed during the period of lockdown. In Brazil the Catholic Bishops published a letter on 1 May, which highlighted the need for an urgent COVID response to protect communities in the Amazon who were already at risk through violence linked to mining, agribusiness and logging.

 

  1. Last year the UK Government responded to our call to publish the guidance for its embassies abroad on how to help local human rights defenders, which was a welcome step to build on. Whilst each context is different and there are no simple solutions, through discussions with partners, we have identified further steps that are important to integrate into the UK’s response to the current crisis:

Recommendations:

  1. Use diplomatic channels to speak out in support of people who are being threatened, criminalised and attacked, and continue to use UK ODA to support local civil society groups and strengthen civil society space.
  2. Work with other governments at national level and at the UN, including supporting Special Procedures, to tackle impunity and ensure that citizens can access justice if they are threatened or attacked.
     

 

Tackling debt postponement and cancellation in the global financial response

 

  1. The economic fallout from Covid-19 will hit the finances of developing countries for many years. The UK can take practical steps, both domestically and with the international community on debt suspension, that will enable developing country governments to tackle the spread of coronavirus head on now and in the future. This form of support to developing countries is urgently needed: according to the IMF thirty-four developing countries were in debt default or at high risk of being so at the start of 2020. 

 

  1. The UK has shown leadership in its participation in the G20 negotiations, that led to the G20 Finance Ministers agreeing in April 2020 to offer 77 countries a suspension on their debt payments to other governments between May and December 2020. At the multilateral level, the UK donated £150 million to an IMF debt relief scheme used for Covid-19. Whilst the IMF has agreed to suspend debt payments for around 25 countries, the World Bank has not yet followed suit. Crucially, however, this all falls short of suspending debt repayments to all bilateral, multilateral and private creditors, which is what is needed to ensure that the current pandemic does not lead to a long-term economic disaster for many developing countries.

 

Recommendations:

  1. As a major shareholder in the World Bank and IMF, the UK should pressure them to use their own resources, including the IMF’s gold reserves, to suspend all debt repayments in 2020 and 2021.
  2. The UK should also support the United Nations to oversee a systematic process which enables developing countries to bring their debt down to sustainable levels through planned restructuring and overall debt cancellation. 
  3. At home, the UK should pass legislation to prevent private creditors under UK jurisdiction from suing developing countries for non-payments of debt. This can build on the precedent of the 2010 Developing Countries (Debt Relief) Act to enable borrowing countries to suspend private debt payments without fear of being sued.

 

Just green recovery 

 

Low carbon transition

 

  1. Developing countries and poor communities most vulnerable to the impacts of COVID-19 are also hardest hit by climate change, degradation/loss of ecosystems and of biodiversity. These threats are already undermining the livelihoods of poor communities and exacerbating poverty and inequality.
     
  2. An estimated USD 10-20 trillion will be invested over the next 6-18 months in the response to COVID-19 and its economic impacts. Recovery packages present a significant opportunity to help communities suffering the economic impacts of the pandemic but also to boost climate-resilient, inclusive development over the long-term and to move away from a dependence on fossil-fuel based development.

 

  1. Increased support for community adaptation/resilience is an essential building block of such development. Current support is insufficient to meet the challenge, with less than 5% (around USD30bn) of all climate finance flowing to adaptation.  Investing USD 1.8 trillion globally in adaptation up to 2030 could generate $7.1 trillion in total net benefits. Inaction could push more than 100 million people below the poverty line by 2030.

 

  1. Along with opportunities, recovery packages present the risk of increased “business-as-usual” investment that fails to address the triple crises of poverty, climate change and biodiversity loss. Support for high-carbon infrastructure, especially high-risk sectors for climate change such as transport (aviation), plastics and fossil fuels, is not aligned with supporting a sustainable and inclusive recovery and would negate the UK’s commitment to align public finance with keeping below 1.5°C of global warming.

 

 

Recommendations:

  1. The UK should not provide further support for fossil fuel development and instead use the recovery to scale up support for a just energy transition to renewable and efficient energy systems globally. This should include support for any UK workers impacted by this transition.
  2. The UK should ensure all its support is aligned with a climate resilient, inclusive recovery across aid, trade and any other financing and policy support, and through bilateral and multilateral channels. The UK’s diplomatic outreach with peer donor countries including in the G7, G20 and in its role as co-host of the COP26 Climate Summit should also be aligned with this objective, including exploring new forms of carbon tax. 

 

Supporting socially and environmentally responsible business 

 

  1. Around the world, governments’ reactions to the pandemic have necessitated financial support to businesses of all sizes on an unprecedented scale, in order that enterprises have a chance of surviving the lock-down period. Having received public subsidies, it is important that businesses meet society’s expectations in return, and ensure that they respect people and the environment consistently in their operations. Two key ways of doing this are through how they treat their workers and throughout the impacts throughout their supply chains

 

  1. The pandemic has highlighted the situation of often invisible workers in sectors such as food, medical supplies or and delivery or transport and the importance of women and men in global supply chains in meeting our society’s needs. The International Labour Organisation has developed a policy framework, including a call that “Measures for economic reactivation should follow a job-rich approach, backed by stronger employment policies and institutions, better-resourced and comprehensive social protection systems”. The UK government, through policy support, UK Aid and support for UK business overseas, should use this policy as the basis for its response. 

 

  1. In the UK, the Global Resources Initiative had already identified that 2020 offered an opportunity for the Government “to convene a global call for action on deforestation and sustainable commodity supply chains in the lead up to COP26.”  As part of a just post-COVID reconstruction, CAFOD supports the taskforce’s recommendation for action at home as well by introducing a mandatory due diligence obligation on business and finance. This will ensure UK business practices keep pace with similar developments at European level, in countries such as France, Germany and Finland.

 

Recommendation:

  1. Drawing on the experience of the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the OECD Due Diligence Guidance for Responsible Business Conduct, the UK government should develop a new law on mandatory environmental and human rights due diligence to support responsible business practices in operations and global supply chains and help prevent future abuses.

 

Building a sustainable food system 

 

  1. The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) predicts that the COVID-19 health crisis could trigger a food crisis. In addressing this pending food crisis, it is vital that the UK works alongside smallholder farmers who currently provide up to 80% of the food consumed in many parts of the developing world. Yet these farmers receive little support from the UK or the international community more broadly as longer-term development investments primarily focus on large-scale agri-business and agricultural exports. The UK has in fact dramatically reduced its support for local rural development and improved livelihoods towards larger scale, export-oriented, commercial agriculture projects that, as a secondary – or increasingly primary – objective, aim to create opportunities for UK business investment. The tide may be turning, however, as DFID has recently funded work of the ‘Just Rural Transition’ under the Food and Land Use Coalition, which is looking at the role of rural agriculture and sustainable land use to tackle poverty, climate change and protect nature.

 

  1. It is notable to see that in the current context of reduced cross-border trade that has compounded issues of food security in many places, countries like Zambia are implementing policies to enhance national food security. Such policies include supporting local industry, supporting the formation of cooperatives, and strengthening local supply chains for Zambian produce to fill the local supermarket shelves. Far from short-term measures, these policies should be seen as a way of providing long-term food security to communities and countries in the context of the changing nature of global trade and the ongoing climate crisis.    

 

Recommendations:

  1. The UK Government must address the role that the current food system has in this pandemic through the destruction of natural habitats from intensive agriculture and livestock practices. COVID-19 is likely a zoonotic disease, passed from animals to humans. Zoonotic diseases are more likely when animals and humans are in closer contact, e.g. through habitat loss and deforestation. Any future UK ODA approach to agricultural transformation in the global South must have a triple focus of protecting nature, tackling poverty and tackling climate change 

 

  1. Ensure the UK’s climate and nature funds are transformative: with an increased focus on nature-based solutions for climate change, poverty reduction with a sensitivity to the priorities of both national governments and local communities


 

 


For more information, contact:

Howard Mollett, Head of Humanitarian Policy, CAFOD

hmollett@cafod.org.uk
 

[1] Message from Lowcock to all Resident Coordinators, Humanitarian Coordinators and heads of OCHA offices globally (20/04/20)

[2] https://charter4change.org/2020/05/07/charter-for-change-statement-on-the-revised-un-ghrp-on-covid19/

[3] Joint Statement on COVID-19 Impacts on Food Security and Nutrition at G20 Agriculture Minister's Meeting by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the World Bank and the World Food Programme (WFP)

[4] https://interagencystandingcommittee.org/system/files/2020-02/Executive%20Summary%2C%20Ethiopia%20IAHE%20Report.pdf