Climate Adaptation Finance and Justice. A Criteria-Based Assessment of Policy Instruments

Abstract

Although the international community repetitively pledged considerable amounts of adaptation finance to the global South, only little has been provided so far. Different instruments have been proposed to generate more funding and this paper aims at identifying those that are most suitable to raise adaptation finance in a just way. The instrument assessment is based on the following main criteria: fairness, effectiveness and feasibility. The criteria are applied to four instruments: contributions from domestic budgets, international carbon taxes collected at the national level, border tax adjustments as well as selling emissions allowances in domestic trading schemes. Domestic emission trading schemes and border tax adjustments achieve the best-or rather, the least bad-results. Two further findings are that (feasible) instruments are unable make agents pay for past excessive emissions and that all instruments generate rather small amounts of funding. As a consequence of the latter, adaptation finance will continue to be highly insufficient in all likelihood.