February 2021 Policy Newsletter Essay
Additionality is a word I have a complicated relationship with. In the early 1990s, climate negotiators and many development professionals were concerned that climate-related aid would disrupt and compete with existing and traditional development projects, such as for irrigation, WASH, and disaster risk management. They created the concept of additionality to ensure that a project had a demonstrated climate component that went above and beyond traditional development. In time, this “above and beyond” element was intended to be quantified rather precisely, and this component — for either climate mitigation or climate adaptation — would be the aspect of a project that would receive climate finance.
In practice, additionality has itself been challenging to implement. I suspect that the negotiators of 25 years ago imagined climate change as something to worry about only in the distant future, and even then, that climate change would only be a relatively small and discrete part of larger projects. The idea of asking a planner or team lead to create two versions of a project — one in a theoretical world without climate change, and one in the real world with climate change — made additionality seem like something easy to calculate and specify. For example, adding an extra 5 cm to the height of a seawall.
But additionality put a lot of technical decision makers like us in a bind. What is an effective adaptation intervention? Are some design features that work for climate change also generally useful? What happens if we have difficulty determining what climate impacts will look like? Do the added costs of flexibility and maintaining options count as “additionality”? In the end, can we truly separate non-climate and climate development projects? And in focusing on the climate aspects of a project, do we risk prioritizing climate impacts over addressing the root causes of vulnerability? All of these points are under dispute.
On the other side of the balance sheet, additionality reminds us that good adaptation really is different than what we have been doing, and that climate finance should really focus on something above and beyond. I have been known to argue from this angle with people who want access to climate finance without doing anything differently — assessing risk, reducing that risk when they can, leaving room for maneuver for the risks that have more uncertainty. We must ask: are our projects resilient? Are they effective for now and the long haul? Climate finance is a new pot of money. Receiving that funding should require new behaviors too.
Poverty alleviation and sustainable development should be seen as a set of activities that occur over climate-relevant timescales. Some problems are very urgent, but unless we’ve climate proofed these projects, they risk being band aids, ripped off by climate impacts a few years from now. And if we ignore this larger sense of additionality, we risk making the poor, vulnerable, and exposed worse off than when we began.
John Matthews
Corvallis, Oregon, USA