Climate finance

Call for long-term commitment

THERE is a concern for the lack of long-term commitment for climate finance from the developed world.

This was according to the acting Attorney-General and Minister for Economy Faiyaz Koya at the climate and development ministerial access to finance and responding to climate impact on Wednesday, March 31.

“Finance continues to be committed for quick ‘fly by night’ initiatives that satisfy the large resource mobilisation KPIs of donors and their intermediaries,” he said.

“Development partners must realise that truly transformative climate or development projects in developing countries need to be spread at least over five to 10 years to better enable structural reforms, techno-economic assessments, creation of robust business cases and an enabling environment for scalability.

“Moreover, we in the Pacific have multiple inherent vulnerabilities that result in higher cost of service delivery, and our governments end up spending much more per capita than any other nations.”

Such issues had to be incorporated and addressed through long-term climate and development finance commitments which brought certainty and predictability to finance flows according to Mr Koya.

“Such long-term perspectives and commitments are key de-risking factors for mobilising critical private finance in climate vulnerable countries,” he said.

Mr Koya also said Fiji had experienced a massive decline in support for pilot initiatives which had become casualties of the rush to meet resource mobilisation targets of climate financiers.

“There is very limited opportunity given to means and market test innovative projects through pilots to create a better business case.

“The need for long-term financial commitments must heavily focus on pilot testing first before scaling later as it helps better incorporate community buyin, encourages country driven development needs and promotes agile development of projects to enable better scalability.

“We must do away with parachuting large scale projects from top – down if we are to truly address the drivers of socio-economic inequity and climate vulnerability.”

Mr Koya said the climate finance landscape was overly complicated and fragmented with multiple sources of finance, each having very different access requirements.

He said this stretched the already limited capacity of developing countries, particularly small island developing states or SIDS in short, to mobilise adequate finance for meaningful climate action.

He added there was an urgent need for more uniformed access modalities and criteria across major bilateral, multilateral and private sources of climate finance.