$100B global climate finance goal three years behind schedule: report
OTTAWA
The world’s wealthiest countries didn’t meet a decade-old goal to provide the developing world with US$100 billion in climate aid by 2020 and won’t actually get there for another two years, a new analysis showed Monday.
The news is expected to cast a pall over next week’s United Nations COP26 climate talks in Scotland. The meeting is meant to finalize the rule book for meeting the 2015 Paris climate change targets, and lay out more ambitious plans to slow global warming.
It was also supposed to start the talks to see developed countries go above the $100-billion-ayear mark in contributions after 2025 to help developing countries and small-island states meet, adapt to and mitigate against climate change.
Those nations are often the most impacted by climate change, but are the least responsible for the global emissions causing global warming to date. Many only agreed to join the Paris agreement in 2015 because of the climate finance pledge made by the wealthiest nations in the world.
Harjeet Singh, a senior adviser at Climate Change Action Network International, said climate finance is “fundamental” and the missed targets for aid are going to erode the trust between the developed world and everyone else.
“What has been delivered today is a delayed plan,” he said in a media briefing Monday. “And then we expect developing countries to come up with a plan where they are going to change their policies for greener development. How can that happen?”
The climate finance plan outlined Monday is the result of a collaboration between Canadian Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson and Germany’s state secretary for the environment, Jochen Flasbarth. The two were asked in July, by COP26 president designate Alok Sharma, to figure out exactly what the financing pledges are through to 2025.
Canada announced last spring it would double its climate aid to more than C$1 billion a year for the next five years, or about US$855 million. Germany announced it would increase its contribution by 50 per cent, to $6 billion euros, or about US$7.3 billion a year, by 2025.
Wilkinson and Flasbarth then spent the last three months wrangling new commitments out of other countries, and Flasbarth said “not all of our conversations were really seen to be polite.”
New Zealand and Sweden are among the countries that responded with new pledges. Thus far Italy, hosting the G20 leaders’ summit later this week, is the most notable on the list of countries that haven’t yet increased their climate finance promise.