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No climate change blood money, experts told  

 
Samoa Observer 
Wed, 27 May 2009  
Apia, Samoa-----Economics of Adaptation to Climate Change was the subject of a study 
mission to Samoa conducted by a group of international agencies. Four international 
consultants met with local partners to address the issue, said Fiu Mata’ese Elisara, 
Executive Director Ole Siosiomaga Society Incorporated (OLSSI). The four consultants 
were Sergio Margulias (World Bank), Peter King (past ADB) of World Bank, Fine Lao 
(Tongan) of SPREP and Heremoni Su’apaia-Ah Hoy (Ministry of Finance).  
 
Mr Fiu told the consultants there is still grave concern about developed countries not 
fulfilling their commitments to the objectives of the United Nations Framework 
Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as they continue to renege on these 
responsibilities and avoid legal liabilities by manipulating flawed solutions through 
market based carbon trading initiatives that only serve to exacerbate the problem instead 
of curbing it. “It is neither morally right nor ethically responsible for Samoa in my view 
to welcome these ‘dirty’ resources given that Samoa has contributed very little if at all to 
the problem and yet we have been asked, and our government has welcomed these 
adaptation resources from global activities like ‘clean development mechanism’ (CDM), 
emissions trading schemes, joint implementation arrangements, monoculture projects, 
and 2 per cent from carbon sinks projects that many people directly affected refer to as 
‘blood monies’ and which in effect allows developed countries to continue with their 
disastrous industrial activities, take over lands that belong to indigenous peoples around 
the world, that translates enormous lands in the developing countries of the South to bio-
fuel to fuel cars of the rich countries of the North, that compensate the culprits in 
schemes like REDD (reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in 
developing countries) and not compensate those who have conserved forests for 
generations, monocultures that threaten food security and violate food sovereignty, as 
well as allowing the rich to enjoy their unsustainable production and consumption that 
further destroy our small countries like Samoa and cause economic disasters from the 
impacts of cc such as cyclones as a direct cause,” he said. “It is unfortunate that despite 
the strong voices from Samoa and AOSIS in the last decade pushing for adequate 
responsibilities by the developed countries as root causes of climate change to take the 
necessary actions to meet the objectives of UNFCCC on curbing climate change, as well 
as accept some legal liability and accountability to the disastrous results of their 
irresponsible actions by continuing to engage in industrial activities that cause continued 
large scale emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, it is now evident that their 
current pre-occupation in the UNFCCC is about resource mobilisation and ignore the 
ethical and moral obligations to push the Annex1 countries to deliver on their 
commitments to the UNFCCC to accept hard and timely emission cuts targets and to 
prevent “dangerous” climate change obligated on them by the convention.” Mr Fiu told 
the consultants that Pacific island countries have a sovereign right to continue to exist as 
nations protected under the Charter of the UN. Thus any impacts that may affect them 

 

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need to be addressed in terms of responsibility, accountability, and violation of human 
rights by those directly involved in the root causes.  
The Bali road map (2007) was clear on responsibilities of developed countries to support 
the financing of adaptation, mitigation, and technology transfer and already there is 
deliberate move by the developed countries to yet again renege on those responsibilities 
and even try to renegotiate the whole UNFCCC and suggest that the IPCC4 report not be 
used as the basis of climate change discussions despite the global high standard and 
integrity of the IPCC4 work calling for urgent action by the rich countries to curb climate 
change, he said. “In Poznan December 2008 the Prime Minister of Tuvalu almost brought 
the roof of the auditorium down in a rousing standing ovation in response to his 
emotional plea that “… Tuvaluans would not accept defeat on climate change. It is our 
belief that Tuvalu as a nation has a right to exist forever…”.  
 
For Samoa as a sovereign country, this too should be our unconditional call, said Fiu. 
“Our rights to exist as nations and survival of peoples and cultures are not negotiable. 
Climate change directly violates those rights and those responsible must bear 
responsibility and be held accountable for our demise when we lose our cultures, when 
our traditional ways of lives are trashed, and when we are denied our freedom to exist as 
peoples and as countries. To say that we can adapt to these losses are injustices so huge 
that it is difficult for the ordinary people to contemplate. “We call on the consultancy to 
heed these contextual positions on adaptation by many of our peoples despite the stands 
by many of our PIC countries, which include Samoa, and pressure those culprits 
responsible for global warming to deliver on their commitments to take real and urgent 
action to curb climate change”  
 
The consultants were asked to ensure that in their study the polluter-pays principle, the 
principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, respective capabilities, the 
precautionary principle, inter-generational equity principle, and all the other Rio 
principles be respected in their study. Fiu said the study should also reflect the principle 
of state responsibility to ensure that the activities within their own jurisdiction do not 
cause damage to the environment of other states or of areas beyond the limits of their 
national jurisdiction. The principle of inter-generational equity is to protect the global 
climate for both present and future generations. “On the issue of adaptation, the first 
problem is that it introduces the notion of ‘replace ability’ of something. In this case, the 
consultants are dealing with replacement and compensatory values of the lives of the 
Samoan peoples. An economic focus for this study will never be able to address fully the 
complexity of social, cultural, environmental, communal, and other factors that are 
integral to faa-Samoa and contribute cumulatively to the sustainable livelihood and 
existence of Samoans as a country and peoples,” said Fiu. “We stressed to the consultants 
that this study needs to go beyond its limited confines of economics and be inclusive of 
all the relevant parameters of what we are asked to adapt to and what replacement values 
it is considering, and what methodology used to holistically value the replacement costs 
of what is involved. “There is Samoan vibrant culture, identity, traditional knowledge, 
eco-systems integrity, natural resources, eco-system services, etc. and we find it not 
morally correct in the case of Samoa and no way to justify replacing a lifestyle, a culture, 
the identity of peoples alive, natural resources, language, spiritual connectivity to the 

 

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dead, traditional approaches, and a peoples. Especially when asked to adapt and we did 
not cause the problem in the first place. The other problem, said Mr Fiu, is with financial 
calculations. “This implies a bias toward the interest of the money guy. You’ll never find 
a process by which the more powerful party ends up giving more than the acceptable 
minimum. This is far from being fair. The capitalist mentality is based on opportunism, 
formally said, opportunity cost: “I decide what to do with my money... unless someone 
more powerful tells me otherwise.” “I also contend that for Samoa it is not unwise, 
unrealistic, or ambitious to push for the concept of “ecological debt” in the climate 
change adaptation study which is now formally pushed by the Government of Bolivia (it 
being one of the seven countries involved with Samoa in this study) as issues of rights, 
justice, and historical indebtedness by developed countries to developing. “Given the 
historical footprint of how the developed countries have made their monies through 
exploitation for generations of the resources of the South, the ‘ecological debt’ needs 
support from the Pacific and Samoa.  
 
All the ‘debts’ through loans from financial institutions like the WB should be 
unconditionally cancelled. The financial flow rightly should be from the North to the 
South and that will help tremendously with the adaptation agenda that befits the struggles 
of the South.” “It makes it more clear that some impacts, especially in terms of the 
impacts on human lives, livelihoods and cultures, cannot be “adapted” to, and that there 
is a moral obligation of developed countries and financial institutions to compensate the 
tremendous exploitation of resources of the South, manipulation of development models 
to suit the interests of the North, acts of bio-piracy, imposition of neo-colonialism 
models, exploitation of the natural resources and peoples of developing world for 
generations, and immense damage they have already caused in the lives of the peoples of 
the developing world.” Mr Fiu told the group that dealing with a man-made crisis such as 
climate change is expensive, sometimes bloody and in human terms invariably late. “We 
believe that the reality has forced us to accept that it would be more humane and less 
expensive to act preventively and focus on resilience and mitigation strategies and to 
meet threats upstream rather than to have them confront us as adaptation crisis 
downstream,” he said. “The consultants are asked to keep this in mind.”