When climate change really kicks in, poorer countries say they're going to need money for things like building flood barriers, helping farmers plant different crops, and boosting health services to combat malaria in places where it's not been a problem before.
Funding for adapting to climate change is on the agenda at the latest U.N.-led climate talks in Bonn this week, on the path to a broader and tougher climate treaty that's being negotiated as a follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol. But development and environmental groups fear that six months after world leaders agreed to launch the process in Bali, progress is too slow.
"The world's poorest people are already paying the price of government inaction," climate change policy adviser Antonio Hill said in a press release from international aid and development agency Oxfam. "Governments have just 18 months to agree a deal and so far their approach has been half-hearted and non-committal."
The agency estimates that between $1 and $2 billion is needed right now to fund the most urgent measures for coping with climate change in the world's least developed countries. And down the line, they'll need to pay to adapt in all sorts of ways, from planting mangroves along coasts to finding alternative jobs for farmers whose land's become too dry to work.
But Oxfam and environmental agency WWF - which wrote their demands on slips of paper and handed them out in fortune cookies to policy makers in Bonn - say rich countries have pledged less than 20 percent of this to the international fund set up for the purpose, and have delivered even less.
Oxfam points out that Japan's contribution of $250,000 is less than what the Japanese people spend every day on air freshener. Tokyo would no doubt argue back that it's just announced a joint $92 million initiative with the U.N. Development Programme (UNDP) to help Africa adapt to global warming.
Few observers expect anything concrete to emerge from the current fortnight of negotiations, and there are another six rounds to go before the marathon talks are due to wrap up by the end of 2009.
But development experts say financing and technology for adaptation must be a crucial part of any post-Kyoto deal in Copenhagen next year.
"There is no way we will have an agreement without polluting countries coughing up large amounts of money to pay for that pollution," Saleemul Huq of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) told a London conference on climate change and development this week.
COMPENSATION, NOT CHARITY
Some donors, including Britain's Department for International Development (DfID), are worried about how such a large amount of money will be managed if it's distributed through a system separate from existing channels for giving out aid cash.
Yvan Biot, who heads up DfID's research on climate change adaptation, is concerned that "big bullies" will get hold of the money - in other words, it could go to elites who might prevent it filtering down to the poorest people who need it most. He thinks the best option is probably to channel it through government budgets as part of development aid.
"The budgetary system is the only democratic system, so by providing a large pot of international money outside that, we could be destabilising democratic processes," he said.
IIED'S Huq says that while creating a new system to distribute money for climate change adaptation may not be ideal, it's the only way to distinguish what he describes as "compensation" for the injustice of global warming from the "charity" of development aid.
At the same time, there's a growing feeling among donors and some developing countries that work on climate change should be integrated into development planning rather than a standalone activity - what's known in the jargon as "mainstreaming".
People working on projects on the ground in poor countries often find it hard to say which box they fit in anyway.
Take the example of a solar-powered water pumping system that's being rolled out in Mozambique by development coalition SouthSouthNorth (SSN) and the government with funding from the Danish aid ministry.
SSN director Boaventura Cuamba told the London conference the amount of surface water available to rural communities is shrinking because of drought, and that means it has to be extracted from the ground through boreholes. With the need to search ever deeper to find water, traditional pumps aren't up to the job.
The new system uses solar panels to power a pump that can supply 15,000 litres of water a day - enough for 500 people and 500 animals - and store it in a tank. It's a system that will raise living standards in places that are never going to be reached by a national water grid, Cuamba explained.
So here's a project in which a low-carbon, renewable energy technology helps a community deal with the effects of climate change and makes their daily lives easier. Is it climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation or development?
SSN calls it an "ADmit project" - a term it describes as "adaptation projects with a mitigation element". Confusing? Perhaps, but aid agencies and developing-country governments that don't want to miss out on international climate change funding have little choice but to wrestle with these tricky problems.
"If development practitioners want to access this new money, they will have to demonstrate what they are doing to build adaptive capacity," said IIED's Huq. "They will have to understand the climate change jargon and engage with this issue."
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