Cancun « Climate Equity

When the Parties in Cancun agreed to set up a global Green Climate Fund (GCF) and tasked a new Transitional Committee (TC) of experts to meet by March 2011 for the first time to get to work on designing the new global climate fund, this was hailed as one of the most important concrete outcomes of the Cancun Agreements. Observers also noticed with hope that the TC would have a majority of its 40 members (namely 25 of them) come from developing countries.  This, so the expectation would ensure that the new Green Climate Fund would be more needs-based and recipient-country driven than is the case with most of the existing climate financing instruments, and less guided by industrialized countries’ demands as primary fund contributors.  Developing countries, having fought so hard before and in Cancun for the Green Climate Fund, seemed eager and excited to get to work quickly…. (more…)

According to Michelle Bachelet, the former Chilean President and now the Executive Director of UN Women, the UN’s new agency promoting women’s rights and their full participation in global politics, “Women’s strength, women’s industry, women’s wisdom are humankind’s greatest untapped resource.” And in her first 100-day work plan as head of the new entity, she has put one big issue front and center on the agenda: promoting coherence with respect to gender equality and gender awareness within the UN system and its processes.  A good starting point for this endeavour: the UNFCCC and its executive director, Christiana Figueres… (more…)

Now that the political decision was made in Cancun in December to set up a global Green Climate Fund, the task turns to the only seemingly more mundane and less glamorous work of figuring out what the GCF should look like and what it can and should do.  Provided, of course that there will be a significant chunk of money flowing through a new GCF.  However, this seems less than clear and might be the biggest of several major design challenges such as its governance facing the new fund…. (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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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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