At the beginning of November 2001, ARRCC wrote to the PM regarding Australia's position on adaptation financing. ARRCC encourages its members to also write to the PM and send a copy to their local politician, setting out their view on climate change, why you believe adaptation financing is important, and what you would like the Government to do.

Read ARRCC's letter, then consider the following points that ARRCC suggests you include in your letter. ARRCC has also created a basic letter template you can download to assist in writing your letter.

• Commend the Government for its commitment of $599 million over the period 2010 – 2012, to the $100 billion p.a. Green Climate Fund agreed upon at Cancun in 2010. Courteously point out that this falls a long way short of the $2 billion a year which would be our country's proportional contribution to the fund.
      
• Urge the Government, via the Minister for Climate Change, Hon. Greg Combet, and/or the Prime Minister, that Australia is not doing its "fair share" of public financing of adaptation projects in developing countries.

You may also wish to include some of the following points.

• If the 2009 Oxfam International estimate of $187 billion a year is indeed what is needed, Australia's "fair share" is calculated to be $4.3 billion annually from 2013 when the new global climate deal begins ("Suffering the Science: Climate change, people and poverty", Oxfam International, June 2009, page 45) Even if we take adaptation needs on their own, and take the higher end of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) figures to be realistic, we would need to scale up our contribution to $1.7 billion per annum. (Harambee, December 2008, TEAR Australia newsletter, based on the upper end of UNFCCC 2007 estimates.) Current contributions are a small fraction of either of these two figures.
     
• At the moment, international commitments to the Green Climate Fund are inadequate to meet the $100 billion a year target. ("UN completes draft of green climate fund: official", by Nina Cestney and Agnieszka Flak, Reuters, 22/10/11) Australia should do its part to increase the resources allocated to the fund.
     
• An Australian negotiator participated in the transitional committee which drafted the design of the Fund. The draft does include provisions for direct access to the funds by developing countries, but this has yet to be approved in Durban. At the UN climate talks, Australian negotiators should support calls from developing countries for more direct access to the fund, rather than having to go through a third party like the World Bank. More direct access would avoid long delays and excessive paperwork, and would enable developing countries to implement their own projects rather than going through outside implementing agencies.