Swedish Climate Aid: What Does the Data Tell Us

Sammanfattning

The EBA Working Paper Series constitutes shorter overviews, surveys, mappings and analyses that have been undertaken to bring about discussion and advance knowledge of a particular topic. Working Papers are not subject to any formal approval process by the Expert Group. Just as in the EBA reports, authors are solely responsible for the content, conclusions and recommendations.

This report has sought to provide descriptive analyis of the Swedish climate aid portfolio, providing the reader with an oversight on trends in the allocation and dibursement of climate aid. Based on the available data, it appears that Swedish bilateral and regional climate aid has decreased in recent years, having peaked in 2019. Substantively more aid is channeled to climate change adaptation as opposed to mitigation, with trends in the period remaining fairly constant.
Countries in Sub-Saharan Africa dominate the list of largest recipients over the period, including those countries that receive aid towards climate change mitigation. This raises questions regarding the effectiveness of aid allocation between countries, particularly as most countries in the region have – comparatively – lower carbon emissions than those countries that receive less mitigation aid.

Analysis of interventions on OpenAid reveal that most climate aid (by volume) works to provide capacity building / technical assistance (primarily to civil society and civil servants), with the majority of climate aid channelled to beneficiaries through multilateral organisations and international NGOs. Key issues raised by the analysis include:

Between country allocation of climate change mitigation aid. The analysis finds that progressively less mitigation aid is provided to countries the more that they emit (relative to their population size). This suggets that the process for allocating climate change mitigation aid could merit further research. Specifically, questions are raised regarding how Swedish mitigation aid is allocated, how country and global needs are considered and weighted against one another, and whether improved (and potentially impactful) methods could be adopted to ensure that mitigation aid is better targeted.

How climate change aid with climate as a ‘significant’ objective is coded. Looking at the narrative descriptions of certain contributions that work with climate change adaptation or mitigation as a ‘significant’ objective, the degree to which they can be understood as ‘climate contributions’ (based on the limited narrative information provided for in the OECD CRS data) might be questioned. Given the substantive amount of climate aid that is coded ‘significant’ – 38% of all climate aid in 2021 alone – this may have implications for the total size of the Swedish climate portfolio. It is worth noting that this issue is consistent with earlier research undertaken by EBA on the attribution of policy markers; with previous analysis suggesting that there may be overuse – and therefore overattribution – of the environmental policy marker in the CRS system, with implications for the total size of the Swedish environment portfolio (Ahrsjö: 2016).8

Documented (or publicly available) motivation for each Rio Marker would serve to improve confidence in figures reported for the total amount of climate aid disbursed. However, in the absence of any such system a specific study analysing the project documents and reports of interventions reported by Sweden as climate aid to the UNFCCC would function to either underline the soundness of reporting, or alternatively shine light on possible issues in the reporting of climate aid. Given the gravity of the climate crises facing the globe, sound data that enables policymakers to understand what is being done – and where gaps in financing exist – is more important than ever, as is the need for interventions that work in targeted ways to improve both climate change adaptation and mitigaton in low-income countries.