Climate fund snags threaten opportunity to fight warming - Ban Ki-moon
BARCELONA, (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Insufficient cash is hampering a flagship international fund to help poor nations combat climate change, which is not working as fast and efficiently as the urgency of global warming requires, said former U.N. SecretaryGeneral Ban Ki-moon.
The Green Climate Fund (GCF) was established at U.N. climate talks in 2010 to channel a substantial portion of the $100 billion per year wealthy nations had pledged to mobilise by 2020 for developing-world efforts to curb carbon emissions and weather the impacts of climate change.
Ban told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that decisions by U.S. President Donald Trump to withdraw his country from the 2015 Paris Agreement on global warming, and to walk away from promises on climate finance jeopardised global commitments.
“I am deeply concerned that the GCF while it has been really trying to work has not been fully funded,” Ban said in an interview from South Korea, where the fund is also based.
“With the U.S. pullout of this (Paris) climate agreement, we are not sure whether $100 billion by 2020 will be met,” he added.
Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama pledged $3 billion to the GCF, but only $1 billion of that funding has been delivered.
Of a total of more than $10 billion committed to the fund, since 2015 it has allocated about $3.5 billion for projects in 78 countries to curb heat-trapping emissions and adapt to more extreme weather and rising seas.
But the last meeting of its 24-member board in July was blocked by disputes over policies and governance, meaning no new projects were approved.
Ban, who is president of the Global Green Growth Institute, a GCF partner, described that result as “quite unfortunate”.
Pressure is growing, including from the U.N. climate change chief, for the GCF to get back to business before major climate talks in Poland in December, to smooth negotiations on a rule book to implement the Paris Agreement.
Ban said the fund should focus on getting things done.
“It should be more effective; it should be more agile,” he said. “Otherwise if you have to wait many months or years to get the funding, by that time we will miss the opportunity to mitigate and adapt (to climate change).”