The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) is still operating under a global warming strategy put in place under the Obama administration, an official told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
While the program is set to run out of money in about five months, it’s an example of one — of probably a quite a few — Obama-era climate programs still operating under President Donald Trump.
USAID will continue operating under its “Climate Change and Development Strategy” until September 2018. The strategy was put in place in 2012 under former Administrator Rajiv Shah and was originally supposed to last until the end of fiscal year 2016.
The Obama administration worked global warming into nearly every facet of federal policy, including foreign aid. The USAID strategy was to help developing “countries and communities prepare for and adapt to climate change” through technical support and funding green energy projects.
“We must work with partner governments and their citizens, civil society and private sectors and draw upon their collective expertise, innovative thinking and emerging science to meet this challenge,” Shah wrote in a letter on USAID’s climate strategy.
“By doing so, we will help drive forward one of our most fundamental development goals: sustainable global growth,” Shah wrote.
But USAID extended its climate strategy in July 2016 “to provide programming guidance to its missions for funding already appropriated by Congress,” a USAID official told TheDCNF. USAID will continue operating under the document through September.
However, no new “funding has been obligated in direct support of the Climate Strategy since” 2016, the USAID official said.
One of the “flagship programs” USAID lists as part of its climate strategy ended in fiscal year 2017, the USAID official told TheDCNF. The program, Enhancing Capacity for Low Emissions Development Strategies (EC-LEDS), issued its last news release in February 2017.
EC-LEDS provided technical support to developing countries looking to cut greenhouse gas emissions. EC-LEDS helped 11 countries develop plans to comply with the Paris climate accord, including Mexico and Indonesia.
The EC-LEDS website still claims it “advances the international goals of the U.S. Climate Action Plan,” which Trump rescinded through an executive order issued in March 2017.
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