Climate regime « Climate Equity

Ever since developed countries in Copenhagen at COP15 pledged significant short- and long-term financial support to help developing countries achieve their climate action goals, the discourse about climate finance – on how to fulfill the pledges from what sources, on which institutional channels to use or create, on how to balance and rationalize the global climate finance architecture and on whether and how to align the monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) of climate finance with that of emissions reductions – has been a dominant driver of the multilateral climate negotiation process. COP17 in Durban starting this Monday will be no different. By some counts no fewer than seven or eight distinct decisions relating to climate finance are on the Durban schedule, all of them interwoven and interlinked in a complex web of conditionalities, reciprocities and political gamesmanship with the larger Durban negotiation package. The most prominent one, , the pivot in the view of many insiders, will be the confirmation of the design for the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and the approval of a transitional process as well as initial funding for its set-up by the parties. Without the GCF and its secured financial sustainability, there will be no Durban package. (more…)

The first meeting of the Transitional Committee (TC), the 40 member body of negotiators tasked by the UN Climate Framework Convention to design a new Green Climate Fund (GCF), started in the same way that summarized the entire design process up to now: delayed.  Almost two months later than the Cancun Agreement had mandated, the TC delegates and close to 100 observers from multilateral and bilateral financial institutions, international organizations, academia, the private sector and other civil society groups convened in Mexico-City on April 28^th for the first time. Except that they didn’t, at least not at first.  Instead, the 40 countries representing the full UNFCCC membership of 194 (with 15 members from developed and 25 from developing countries) haggled in a non-public “non-session” for several hours fiercely over which countries should chair the process from now on.  In the end, a “troika” of countries was confirmed with Mexico (the current COP presidency), South Africa (the future COP presidency) and Norway sharing the TC leadership as co-chairs.  (more…)

With just a few negotiation days left and the high-level segment of the COP 16 in Cancun now officially started, ministers and their teams face a stark choice in deciding what kind of global climate fund they should throw their support behind – one that will largely continue the traditional donor-recipient relationship between industrialized countries and developing countries and mimic development aid flows (model of the World Bank climate investment funds) or the one which puts that relationship on a new footing and restores developing countries’ faith in the seriousness of the developed countries commitments (a larger scale and improved Adaptation Fund model).  Given this introduction, it is not difficult to figure out which of the two strongly opposing options I personally favor…. (more…)

…. this is the condensed conclusion of the final report – recently released – of the UN Secretary-General’s High-level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing (AGF), which was tasked with trying to find ways to raise US$100 billion per year by 2020 for mitigation and adaptation actions in developing countries.  This number — far less than what many experts believe is really needed — was the sort of political compromise, the lowest common financial denominator, leaders came up with at last year’s international climate negotiations in Copenhagen. 

Just a few short weeks before the international climate negotiations head into the next big round of  talks at the COP16 in Cancun, Mexico, the panel hopes that their guardedly forward-looking assessment – it would be too optimistic to call it optimistic — on how the long-term climate funding promised in the Copenhagen Accord can be pieced together, might move global climate talks forward by securing. if not a comprehensive climate deal, so at least a financing package. 

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On the road from Copenhagen to Cancun, climate negotiators from around the world will meet in Tianjin, China, from October 4th to October 9th for a last round of negotiations prior to the next COP in Mexico at the end of November.

ClimatEquity asks Chinese climate expert Yu Jie, who has participated in UNFCCC negotiations and COPs since 2004, about her expectations for Tianjin and Cancun.

CLIMATEQUITY: What do you expect will happen during the UNFCCC talks in Tianjin? Will we see any progress? Will climate finance be one area where there might be some high expectation for Tianjin and Cancun? What is the Chinese position on climate financing resources?

YU JIE: At the last session in August in Bonn, the parties in the working group on long term cooperative action (AWG LCA) finally agreed on the new chair’s text to work on. Currently, this text with 70 pages will have to be cut down to more manageable size, although it will be an extremely though job to remove hundreds of brackets, particularly when the thread to connect these pieces is missing. This missing thread is strong political will which in reality, seems to have been sapped by the domestic legislative process in the United States. Therefore, I agree with the view that climate finance could be an area where a substantial result in Cancun seems possible. Tianjin will then be one of the stops to build consensus towards Cancun.

The Chinese government holds the same position as the G77 on finance, but in contrast to many developing countries, it is pretty neutral on issues related to finance such as the debate who should govern a Global Green Fund. On providing resources for financing, China thinks they should come from a global carbon tax, rather than from carbon market proceeds.  (more…)

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. 

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On Monday, the climate negotiations go into their next round toward the COP 16 in Cancun, when UNFCCC delegates come together in Bonn.  But the hopes of those expecting a boon in talks for a 2012 post-Kyoto climate regime are likely to be busted.  Already before the meeting starts, it seems certain that the results will be minimal — at best. Turnout of negotiators, in the midst of vacation season, is expected to be low.  Even lower are observers’ expectations: Basically, the only joint approach currently thinkable is one blockading further progress in emissions cuts, in which the industrialized countries and the largest emerging market countries operating as BASIC group (Brazil, India, China and South Africa) seem to be, sadly, in agreement…. 

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This entry was written by Janne Rohe, who works at the Heinrich Boell Foundation’s Regional Office for Mexico, Centralamerica and the Caribbean.

Climate finance has played an important role in the ongoing debates within climate change negotiations and is one of the relevant issues to be discussed at COP 16. Yet the debate has focused so far more on donor than on recipient countries.

Although in Mexico climate finance has been a popular topic at governmental level and for the Mexican delegation within UNFCCC negotiations, the international debate has not yet reached all sectors and local agendas in the country. This is why the Mexican NGO Centro Mexicano de Derecho Ambiental (Mexican Center of Environmental Law) in coordination with the World Resources Institute (WRI), Oxfam Mexico and the Mexican Office of the Heinrich Boell Stiftung (HBS) organized a two-day workshop “Financing the change, without changing the climate” in Mexico City in mid July. Actors from civil society, the private sector and the academic field participated on this occasion and learned about recent international negotiations, finance mechanisms and institutions, open challenges, criteria for a possible agreement and financial options for Mexico. The discussions during the workshop mainly reflected the discourse on the national level. (more…)

The real innovative climate financing resource that everybody is looking for might have a name. It could be Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, George Soros or Oprah Winfrey. Forget about carbon taxes, airline levies and cruise line surcharges which a UN High Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Financing – including billionaire George Soros —  is currently mulling over in an increasingly desperate search to find new finance sources to pay for mitigation and adaptation effort in developing countries. They are controversial and politically hard to implement.  For the real feel-good and quick solution, the 20-member expert panel should look no further than, lets say Seattle, Omaha or New York. 

Especially now that both Bill Gates and Warren Buffett are appealing to their fellow US billionnaires to follow their lead and to donate at least half of their wealth for good causes. It could be done with a simple stroke of a pen (or keyboard, nowadays). In fact, this is probably exactly how those enormous fortunes have ballooned in the age of unfettered financial speculation…

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The good news first: going only by sheer numbers, the European Union is delivering on the fast start funding commitment it gave on behalf of its 27 member countries during the COP15 in Copenhagen as part of the Copenhagen Accord political final declaration. 

The bad news: it is far from certain whether that commitment represents “new and additional” money as promised in the Copenhagen Accord, or rather the ingenious creativity of the European block – very much wanting to be perceived publicly as the “good guys” on the question of delivering money to fund adaptation and mitigation actions in developing countries — in double-counting, recycling, overestimating or blatantly hiding the real figures, as some observers charge. 

During a side event at the Bonn climate talks on Thursday, the representatives of the Commission and several  EU countries delivered ten fast-paced presentations, choke-full of numbers which aimed at knocking out the air – and the many doubts – from the listeners in an already pretty airless overcrowded meeting room.  This was a more detailed presentation than the information gathered from an EU document leaked two weeks ago, which had left observers of fast track climate financing underwhelmed.

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