 So, very, very welcome to all of you. We will start this day to try to understand if aid has become greener or not. And also, I mean, what is the actual character of aid when it comes to environment and climate change? And what can we learn from it? We would start out with hearing about the aid database. It will be a Christmas core that will present it. And then we go to the case studies in Africa. We will go to Uganda with the help of Esesa Katerega. Okay. Let's start. The aid database contains nearly one million past and present activities around the world. Activities of aid. What can we learn from that? Please welcome Christmas core from the University of Indiana. So I'm here to present a very brief overview of a very broad picture of environmental aid as a result of my work with Michael Tierney and others at the College of William and Mary on the aid data project. And so without any further ado, and also, sorry, I should say by the way, the location of this specific project is at, it's on the web at www.aiddata.org, okay. So what is aid data, first and foremost, aid data is a collaborative research effort that was initiated at the College of William and Mary and Brigham Young University in the United States and now has a number of institutional sort of allies in Development Gateway, the US Agency for International Development, and others. And so what aid data does is it is a database of individual development projects from both bilateral aid agencies such as CEDA and the USAID, as well as multilateral institutions such as the World Bank, Global Environment Facility, et cetera. And what aid data does that is really unique is that for each individual project spanning the years from the 1970s all the way up to the present, we have had a team of researchers read through project descriptions and classify the environmental impacts of these projects so that we can get a sort of uniform understanding of how aid is changing and what can we learn about trends in development finance over time. And this is enormously useful because if, you know, without this sort of resource, we have really only, you know, donor agencies to go on and different agencies may use different criteria in judging what counts as climate finance, what counts as environmental aid. There may be changes over time, political pressures to characterize aid one way versus another way and, you know, by using a consistent, you know, coding protocol we can sort of avoid some of those difficulties. And so what I'm here to do today is to present some recent findings from the recently updated aid data environment database. So the first thing that we've done for each individual project from all donors, bilateral OECD members, non-OECD members and multilateral agencies is characterize the likely environmental impact of aid based on the detailed project descriptions, right? And based on these we characterize the primary environmental impact as being either beneficial, environmentally beneficial, so over here on the right we have environmental aid, aid that is, has a relatively neutral impact on the environment and aid that may have a harmful environmental impact, right? That is the sort of very broadest sort of first cut that we take. Specifically within the category of environmental aid, we then characterize the scope of impact of environmental aid because one of the things that we're interested in tracking is developments in aid designed to address primarily local environmental challenges such as the availability of clean water, as well as aid to address more global issues such as biodiversity loss and of course climate change. And so to give you a very quick example, we have, I have two examples here of what we classify as green projects and two examples of what we would classify as brown projects where green refers to global environmental issues and brown refers primarily to local environmental issues, right? And so the first example that we have is a project funded by Sweden beginning in 2001 in the amount of 28,000 US dollars and this was a project to promote aluminum recycling. We have a US project to promote elephant awareness education that falls under the general rubric of species conservation and biodiversity conservation, aid to Zimbabwe and then for example we have projects from Spain to Brazil regarding waste management and disposal, projects from UNICEF in Tajikistan for water and sanitation. These latter two projects have a primarily local benefit, right? And so we classify these as brown aids. A brown is, here does not connote dirty or environmentally harmful but rather aid with a primarily local benefit as opposed to aid that has a primarily global benefit that transcends the actual recipient. And so just to give you a preview of whether or not aid has become greener over time. We have recently updated our database from 2000 up through 2008 and we have found that in fact the amount of green aid in particular has increased starting in the mid-2000s. So to the first question of has aid become greener over time we can answer that question in the affirmative. There is increasing provision of green aid. I should have mentioned also that these figures are in constant 2000 US dollars, right? So in 2008 for example we have, we see about 15 billion US dollars of environmental aid according to our criteria, roughly, you know, 6 billion of which is for global environmental issues which represents a fairly substantial increase from the 1990s. The other major trend that we have noticed is that alongside this increase in the amount of green aid that's being provided by the international community, starting in the 2000s and the mid-2000s there has been a rather large increase in the amount of environmental aid that has been provided through bilateral channels such as the USAID or CEDA as opposed to multilateral organizations such as, for example, the World Bank or the United Nations Development Program. And so our paper offers a political economic theory that offers some conjectures to explain why this is taking place and if there is interest in that I will refer you to our paper and I'm happy to discuss this afterwards but given the interests of time I'd like to sort of skip over this right now and really focus on what we think are the likely consequences of this. The fact that we care that aid is becoming bilateralized and that more and more environmental aid is being provided through bilateral channels isn't more aid better, period. And in one sense, of course, it is but there are some challenges that increasing bilateralization can bring, right? So as scholars of international organization we understand many benefits of multilateral cooperation and among those benefits include, of course, reducing transaction costs, increased communication. Different donors have an understanding of what other donors are doing in particular recipient areas and with respect to specific issues. And so all of those benefits of collaboration they aren't necessarily lost if aid becomes more bilateralized but if we're not careful they can be, right? And so to give you an example we notice this trend is particularly strong in with respect to the delivery of green aid. That is aid for things such as climate change and biodiversity for global environmental issues. We've gone from a situation in the 1990s where roughly half of all green aid was provided through multilateral organizations. Starting in the mid-2000s we've seen a spike in the delivery of green aid almost all of which is accounted for by increases in bilateral aid provision, right? And so given recent events such as the agreement in Copenhagen in 2009 to establish substantial new funding for climate this leads us to wonder exactly how these trends fit within existing institutions and existing institutional frameworks. We see less, this trend is less noticeable with respect to provision of aid for local environmental benefits. So there's something that is specific to global environmental issues that has led donors to increasingly focus on the provision of aid through their bilateral agencies rather than working through multilateral avenues, right? And so I'd like to leave with just a few basic thoughts, you know, specifically, you know, hooking up these findings to current politics in the future of the Green Climate Fund, right? So you know, we note that developing countries have been united in their demands for climate funds to be administered through United Nations organizations, through the conference of parties to the Kyoto Protocol, for example. There have been related demands for direct access to funds, you know, in which national governments and recipient countries can administer funds through national implementing agencies, right? And while the steps towards the creation of the Green Climate Fund have been celebrated as a victory, there remain questions, you know, about how much funding it will actually govern, right? How much of this supposed $100 billion a year in financing will actually be provided, right? So far, only about 2% of fast start climate funds that is funding, you know, committed through 2012 have been channeled through the conference of parties to the Kyoto Protocol, right? And there have been, you know, so, what was I going to say? The creation, basically, the fundamental question that we have is, you know, the creation of these funding structures that reflect all of these normative principles, you know, of greater voice for recipient countries, right, and greater participation and more democratic participation, you know, we can celebrate all of these institutional changes and the creation of all these new institutions that reflect these normative principles, but if, in fact, donors are resisting, committing funds through these institutions, the question remains, you know, whether this is perhaps a hollow victory, like how much finance do these new institutions actually govern, right? So what can aid data do? I don't mean to present to sound overly pessimistic about this, you know, given this trend towards increasing bilateralization. The fact remains that we have seen increasing funds committed for environmental purposes and specifically for green purposes, such as climate, right? So there are, there is some positive news to work with. And so one of the things that we are trying to do in aid data is fill in this sort of informational gap that can be created through this increasing bilateralization of environmental and climate aid, right? So what aid data can do, we can track nearly all climate finance in one place using existing technology that we've developed for the aid data database, right? We can consistently using a single theoretically justified definition, identify climate adaptation aid and mitigation activities across all donors, you know, in all, you know, aid systems. And by doing so, you know, we can really increase transparency in climate finance and environmental aid, you know, and increase participation in monitoring of such aid, right? And I'll give you an example of just how this can work. One of the things that aid data is currently implementing that should be online this fall, you know, fall of 2013 is this thing called an enhanced project view. So I mentioned that aid data is a collection of nearly, or actually now, over one million individual projects spanning all OECD development assistance to committee members, non OECD donors, such as wealthy states in the Middle East, as well as multilateral agencies such as the World Bank. So we track every individual project in every year for all of these donors going back to the 1970s and in some cases even earlier. So what this enhanced project view actually does for each individual project, right, it provides, you know, for researchers, for journalists, for ordinary citizens, for academics, it provides a wealth of information at a glance about the character of a project, you know, how much money is involved, what is the main purpose of the project, when does it begin, how long, what are the terms of repayment, that sort of thing. In addition, we're offering geographic information about the location of the project, right? So for this project, for example, you know, we can see that this takes place, you know, in a geographic area, you know, centered on La Paz, for example. You know, we offer an online Wiki such that anybody, you know, a journalist and academic, a citizen in the recipient country can post questions or comments regarding the status of the project and regarding implementation specifically, can also, we don't see it here, but there will also be a capacity for people to upload photographs, for example. So if there's a project to establish a school or a water treatment facility, you know, we can actually show ongoing pictures to document, you know, the ongoing implementation of the project. And finally, over here in the bottom right-hand corner, you know, there is an opportunity for people to link to additional content. So if, for example, you know, people have done, you know, research regarding agricultural assistance in Nicaragua, for example, you know, we can link to academic articles or we can link to media resources. And so this is basically a way to provide just a wealth of information about each individual project in one glance. So while most of what I've shown you so far is a result of taking individual project information and aggregating up to the broadest possible level, right, to show you a macro trend in, you know, the provision of climate aid, for example, or the provision of environmental aid more broadly. The actual value in aid data lies not only in its ability to facilitate that sort of research, but also to work the other way, right? So individual donors or prospective donors, including even private donors, can use this resource to see, you know, what sort of environmental projects have been financed in a specific country? Who's doing work there? So if we want to contribute to agricultural assistance in a specific location, we can see which other agencies, for example, are already active in that area. And so, you know, by dramatically increasing transparency, we can hopefully facilitate communication among existing donors, such that, you know, even if current trends continue towards increasing bilateral delivery of environmental aid, at least with increased information and increased transparency, you know, we can increase possibilities for collaboration. And so with that, I'd like to close the comments, close my initial comments, although I'm happy to talk about any of these issues in much greater detail. But thank you.