Fast Start Finance « Climate Equity

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…)

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).

(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. 

(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. 

(more…)

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.

(more…)