One might disagree over sources, amounts, governance or beneficiaries, but nobody seriously involved in global climate talks doubts that climate finance, especially how to secure the long-term funding needed for migration and adaptation globally, is — to speak with the words of UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres — “the central propeller that drives climate change action”.
So, the recent initiative of the Mexican and Swiss governments to convene a two day meeting of high-level government representatives from 46 countries in Geneva to discuss the sources and governance structure of long-term climate finance in order to prepare the ground (mostly through the building of trust via open dialogue — under the Chatham House Rule) for a far-reaching and binding climate finance agreement at the COP 16 end of November is commendable. Talk they must, the more open and “out-of-the-box” the better, but the buck (in form of some vague commitments of future funding some time, somehow) cannot stop there.
It is, of course, difficult for non-participants to assess how non-negotiation talks like the meeting in Geneva might help in gaining ground for a global deal on climate finance that some optimists still hope could be struck in Cancun. No details have so far emerged from the discussions. And the press release summarizing the dialogue meeting simply as “constructive” gives describing it as ”bland” a spicy connotation….
Geneva did however serve as a launching platform for a new “official” climate finance tracking website thought up by the Dutch over the last few months. Called “Fast Start Finance“, it asks participating countries (currently only Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and the UK) to put the numbers for their actual contributions this year under the Copenhagen fast start commitment (for a total of US$30 billion until 2012) on the table. Proving at least adequate progress towards fulfilling this political pledge is according to insiders ”the golden key for the outcome in Cancun”. Not only Christiana Figures thinks that without it, seriously, there is little to discuss in Cancun.
The new official website (in which World Bank, UNEP, UNDP and the Secretariat of UNFCCC participate) might be considered an important step forward toward more transparency and accountability by industrialized countries in global climate finance — although without rigorously applied uniform guidelines as well as oversight by an independent observing entity on how much of these pledged and committed funds are really “new and additional” as promised in Copenhagen, the sincerity of the effort can be debated.
For example, right now countries self-report — and consequently self-inflate — the numbers they are submitting to the website as their actual fast-track finance contributions. In the case of Germany, it has been well documented and criticized (including in this blog) that the amount of truly additional climate finance committed for 2010 is tending toward zero. Other countries, such as the UK or France are also showing unfettered creativity in labeling financial contributions towards the fast start commitment as additional when they are anything but.
Several civil society efforts to track climate funding, including www.climatefundsupdate.org, a website set up by the Boell Foundation and the Overseas Development Institute, seek to reveal the honest numbers. Their researchers have come up repeatedly against the reluctance of government officials in donor countries to forthrightly explain the sources and composition of the sums governments proclaim to be new climate finance money. Information without honesty is neither accountable nor transparent.
To the extend that a governments-owned website such as the one today revealed in Geneva aims to showcase inflated and dishonest numbers of their respectiove climate finance contribution under the ongoing fast track commitments, it might as well seize operation immediately. As such, it has about the same credibility as glossy weight-loss brochures promising gains without the pains. Where, however, such an effort can contribute to a globally accepted definition and universally applied guidelines of what can be understood as “new and additional” climate finance, the website — with the future participation of other major industrialized countries, primarily the United States and Japan — could provide a real step forward in transparency and accountability efforts for global public climate finance. Provided, of course, the numbers do add up to correctly and in a significant amount…
Photo: Fayster with Creative Commons License
Tags: accountability, Cancun, climate finance, Fast Start Finance, transparency, UNFCCC
