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…)
Artikel getagged mit ‘climate finance’
The Complex Web of Climate Finance Decisions in Durban — with the Green Climate Fund at its Center!
Engendering the Green Climate Fund — An Opportunity for Best Practice
Gender considerations are currently not systematically addressed in existing climate financing instruments; where gender appears, it is in bits and pieces. Probably the main reason for that is that gender was not integrated into the design and the operationalization of these financing mechanisms from the very outset – as is the case for the World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds (CIFs) as well as for the Least Developed Countries Fund (LDCF) or the Special Climate Change Fund (SCCF) administered by the Global Environment Facility, and even the Adaptation Fund, which only started project funding last year. This is where the Green Climate Fund, currently designed by the 40 members of the Transitional Committee, has a chance to do better: It has an opportunity to be truly transformative and distinguish itself from existing funds by being the first to integrate a gender perspective from the outset. Gender as a cross-cutting issue must guide the discussions about the scope, the governance and operational guidelines of the Green Climate Fund in the Transitional Committee. (more…)
Germany’s Chance and Challenge — Funding the Energy Transformation at Home AND Abroad!
Observed around the world with varying degrees of curiosity, high expectations and hopes, skepticism, potential good will or schadenfreude, Germany, Europe’s largest economy, has embarked on probably the furthest reaching energy transformation of any industrialized country by its recent government decision – confirmed by a parliamentary vote end of June – to phase out nuclear energy by 2022. This will be a costly endeavor, no doubt, a multibillion-dollar experiment to improve the country’s electricity grid and scale up generation and use of renewable energy domestically. If Germany’s great energy transformation effort succeeds, other industrialized countries will have a harder time arguing that a low-carbon energy transformation will necessarily cost jobs, reduce a country’s economic growth and threaten its global competitiveness.
Yet, the German experiment can only then be judged a true success, if Germany does not fund its national energy transformation at the expense of its international obligations and pledges to help developing countries finance their own low-carbon and climate-resilient development. Funding both the energy transformation at home and internationally at the same time, without short-cuts and excuses: this will set Germany apart from the rest of the industrialized world and cement a true German leadership position in climate actions globally ….. (more…)
From Anticipation to Confusion and Delay: The First Design Meeting for the Green Climate Fund
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…)
Gender Coherence at the UN — An Action Plan to Combat Climate Change
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…)
Designing — and Funding! — the new Green Climate Fund
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…)
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…)
“Challenging, but feasible,….”
…. 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.
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…)
Yasuni ITT: It’s Worth the Trust!
In 2007, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa first suggested that his country would forgo oil exploitation in its Yasuni National Park indefinitely if the world community would compensate the Ecuadorean people for half of the unrealized income of US$ 7.2 billion via contributions to a special trust fund. This innovative idea for a new way to help a resource-rich but income-poor country like Ecuador overcome its resource-curse and develop in a more sustainable and climate-friendly way “post-petroleum” was greeted with a lot of enthusiasm. Germany, having long established development cooperation ties with Ecuador, was one of the first countries signaling their support for such a fund. In 2008, the German parliament, in a rare display of unity across the aisles, confirmed its willingness to appropriate funding. Fast-forward three years: Ecuador has been able to transform an innovative idea into a legally sound mechanism. In early August, the Yasuni Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini (ITT) Trust Tund, which ismanaged by UNDP, became a reality and ready to receive major contributions…
But what is not (yet) happening, is major donor country support. Especially, the recent refusal of Germany’s Development Minister Niebel to pay into the Yasuni Trust Fund is a setback. One cannot underestimate the bad signal it sends to other potential donor countries hinting that the Trust Fund might, well, not be trustworthy. On top of it, Germany does itself – and its aspirations to global leadership in issues like climate change and institutions such as the UN Security Council – a huge disservice. Let’s hope that the setback is temporary – and Germany’ can embrace the Yasuni Trust Fund in a major way after all. There are many good reasons, why this innovative development financing tool is worth the world community’s support and generous financial contributions by countries such as Germany. (more…)
