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 Complex Web of Climate Finance Decisions in Durban — with the Green Climate Fund at its Center!
A Stark Choice — Two Opposing Models for the Global Climate Fund
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…)
B+ for Effort, C -for Execution — The EU’s Fast Start Finance Report
Well, let’s start with the good news first: the European Union and its 27 member countries have been good to their word and delivered a summary report on fast-start-finance commitments in time for the COP 16 in Cancun. It is to be EUR 2.2 billion in 2010. As such, the EU — and the member countries who have taken the exercise serious enough to provide specific individual project information – have to be commended, and I give them a B+ for effort and initiative. It cannot be easy for the EU Commission to try to bring 27 rascally students, pardon, countries, to order and make them do their homework in time.
Other industrialized countries, such as Japan, the United States or Australia have likewise joined in a mad scramble pre-Cancun — maybe as part of the peer pressure the early EU commitment for such a report created — and offered their take on how they are contributing to fulfilling the collective political pledge industrialized countries made a year ago in Copenhagen to come up with US$ 10 billion in “new and additional” fast start money for climate change action in developing countries for 2010, 2011 and 2012 respectively.
Alas, the execution of these reporting efforts is still insufficient. I’ll give the EU effort, the most comprehensive of the FSF reporting by industrialized countries, a C – at present, but hold out hope for, and encourage, improvement, both short-term (for the next report) and long-term (in the way climate funding is delivered).
Climate Talks in Tianjin: Will China Assume a High or Low Profile?
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…)
Illegal Logging is Declining — but Rainforests are not yet “out of the Woods”…
Illegal logging and trading in illegally sourced wood products is globally one of the major causes of deforestation and forest degradation in many developing countries. It not only robs cash-strapped developing country governments of much needed revenues, it also destroys the livelihood of worldwide several hundreds of million of people who depend on forests. The destruction of forests — illegal or government-sanctioned — is also a significant contributor to global carbon dioxide emissions, according to some estimates close to 20 percent. So, it must be considered good news that a new study by the British Chatham House finds by looking at twelve major producer, processing and consumer countries that illegal logging globally has fallen by 22 percent over the course of the last decade, or more specifically by about 50 to 75 percent in the Brazilian Amazon, by 75 percent in Indonesia, and still by half in Cameroon.
As a result up to 17 million hectares of forest are estimated to have been protected from degradation in the five tropical timber producers studied. This adds up to at least 1.2 billion tons and possibly many more of avoided carbon dioxide emissions since 2002. In comparison: in 2009, Germany, globally the sixth biggest CO2 polluter, blasted 760 million tons into the atmosphere. (more…)
Germany’s international climate budget zeros out…
The German conservative-liberal coalition government of Chancellor Angela Merkel (who in an earlier incarnation was portraying herself as international climate policy champion) has apparently decided that in the face of budgetary shortfalls and fiscal consolidation its international climate finance commitments can be considered nill and void. This seems the only explanation for the cabinet’s recent decision to appropriate in its draft budget for 2011 and its projection for 2012 under the budget lines “Climate Protection Measures in Developing Countries” for the Development Cooperation and Environment Ministries only one dismal figure: ZERO.
EU: Off to a Good “Fast Start”?
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.
Post-Copenhagen: Swing time in the United States, Europe plays the Blues
Photo: pidjoe, License: iStockphoto
What becomes obvious for a European working on climate change in Washington DC is the completely different perception of the Copenhagen outcome on both sides of the Atlantic. While European governments are frustrated and disappointed, most climate advocates in the United States define Copenhagen as a success and an important step forward towards tackling global climate change. Why is it Swing time in the US and Europe plays the climate Blues? (more…)
