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WHY should we talk about corruption when we talk about climate change? This question dominated many discussions at the International Anti-Corruption Conference in Washington, D.C. last week. The answer is straightforward: corruption undermines attempts to tackle the climate crisis.
It is a welcome development then to see two powerful movements — anti-corruption and climate action — engage and highlight where their agendas overlap. Our challenges are complex and cross-cutting, and it’s only by recognising this that we can tackle them. After this year’s floods, Pakistan should pay particular attention to how corruption threatens climate mitigation and adaption efforts and exacerbates climate injustice.
Corruption and climate change intersect in numerous ways. At the highest level, any corruption that reduces the public coffers hampers a state’s ability to respond to the climate challenge by reducing the funding available to deploy in areas such as renewable energy or climate-resilient urban development.
Another link is the inappropriate divergence of funds needed to tackle climate change-related disasters, both pre-emptively and after the fact. The image of illegally built hotels on riverbanks being washed away during this summer’s floods will stay with Pakistanis for many years, but insufficient attention has been paid to the corruption that likely enabled those developments in the first place.
Climate change and corruption intersect in many ways.
Similarly, financial flows for relief, rehabilitation and reconstruction in the wake of climate disasters are at risk of ending up in the wrong pockets, either as a result of theft or diversion, or because the rapid granting of contracts for reconstruction activities creates opportunities for these to be awarded on a collusive or preferential basis.
Pakistan saw warning signs of this in October when the US rang alarm bells about potential corruption in the disbursement of $160 million it had provided for flood relief, less than a quarter of which was dedicated to on-the-ground relief efforts.
A key concern is how corruption can skew how climate policies are developed — vested interests with little commitment to climate action use illicit means to stifle progressive climate policies and legislation to protect the status quo. This is a greater challenge when it takes the form of legalised corruption, such as industry lobbying to reject carbon tax proposals.
Another area of concern is the exploitation of incentives for climate mitigation or adaptation. A growing number of states offer tax incentives or subsidies for those participating in renewable energy or other green transition projects, and these are vulnerable to fraud, eroding meaningful efforts to address the climate crisis.
Most climate mitigation and adaptation efforts require the development of new projects, related land acquisition, deployment of new technologies, all following the receipt of relevant permits or licences. These are activities prone to bribery and corruption; it is only by proactively managing these risks that climate-related projects can avoid delays and other disruptions.
There are various other areas where corruption threatens climate action. For example, corruption enables environmental crimes that may in turn have climate change implications — think of rampant illegal logging that fuels deforestation, which in turn leads to less greenhouse gas absorption thereby fuelling climate change.
Much attention has already been paid to the lack of transparency on reporting on climate goals, ranging from states’ manipulation of climate change-related data collection to corporate greenwashing. And warning signs are already flashing around complex market mechanisms, including carbon credits, that will inhere rampant fraud without adequate oversight.
Speaking at the conference, Stephen Gardiner, professor of Human Dimensions of the Environment at the University of Washington eloquently argued that climate change is creating a perfect moral storm. He pointed out that various inequalities — the fact that high-emitting nations cause damage in low-emitting countries, or that elites insulated from climate shocks drive policymaking that most affects the poor and marginalised — undermine people’s abilities to be ethical actors in the context of climate change.
He also emphasised the inter-generational injustice that defines climate inaction (what he termed the “tyranny of the contemporary” against future generations, which entails privileging present demands over future suffering).
Against this backdrop, he expanded the notion of corruption to include moral corruption, which he argued manifests in the way we talk about climate change and how we build norms and institutions to manage the crisis. Recognising that our very approach to the climate crisis is distorted is a powerful lever to effect meaningful change. Sadly, moral corruption is even more challenging to root out than endemic venality.
The writer is a political and integrity risk analyst.
Published in Dawn, December 12th, 2022
