Where’s the money promised for fighting climate change in developing countries?
Arguably, climate change was one of the most important issues in the recent federal election, and twothirds of Canadians voted for parties that promised to implement serious policies to address this issue. Right now, the countries of the world are gathering again, in Spain — the latest in a seemingly endless series of meetings on climate change, amid dire recent predictions that they will not deliver on their promises to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. So now is the right time to ask: Where is the significant fund of money that Canada and other developed nations promised to make available to lessdeveloped countries to help them to make appropriate contributions to controlling global warming?
Under the terms of the 2015 Paris Agreement, most nations have submitted initial or revised Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), representing their pledges to curtail GHG emissions by 2030 in terms of various criteria (percentage reductions from a baseline year, peaking of emissions, reductions in emissions or carbon intensity per unit of GDP and so on). Another feature of the agreement (Article 9) indicated that developed countries should provide, through a set of four special funds, $100 billion (U.S.) annually to developing countries to assist the latter in meeting their commitments. On Sept. 7, 2015, a group of 18 potential donor states (hereafter Group of 18) issued a public statement affirming the “goal of jointly mobilizing $100 billion a year by 2020 from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance, to address the needs of developing countries, in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation.” (The 18 proponents were: Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, United States and the European Commission.)
The year 2020 is fast approaching. Nothing much has been heard about this pledge from the Group of 18 in recent years. OXFAM’s Climate Finance Shadow Report of 2018 says that these flows for climate mitigation and adaptation have amounted to only $16 billion to $21 billion at most, and that larger amounts reported in official documents have conflated climate finance with more general socioeconomic development assistance.
As of now, the world’s options for dealing with climate change are only two in number, namely, either extensive decarbonization or a fullscale resort to the geoengineering of the climate. Geoengineering is highly problematic: Apart from CO2 sequestration in underground chambers, the main suggested techniques are either untested, not yet scaled up or rather risky — or all three. Decarbonization means finding alternatives to the use of fossil fuels for energy generation, and as such it is the only currently feasible strategy for combatting climate change.
The problem is, however, that time is short, when one considers how much inertia is building in global emissions and how hard it is at this point to envision with high confidence when a plateauing might occur. Decarbonization in still-developing countries, where almost all of the emissions growth is concentrated as of now, is seriously constrained by a lack of capital.
Realization of the $100 billion per year pledge is now jeopardized by the withdrawal of the United States from its commitments under the Paris Agreement.
However, the other 17 countries which made that pledge in 2015 — including Canada, of course — must, as a matter of national honour, reaffirm publicly their own commitment to that pledge. This is the first of four steps must be taken by those countries as soon as possible in 2020.
Second, Canada and the others must at the same time, in the interests of transparency, announce exactly how the flow of funds will be structured. Third, that group of nations must consider how the annual pledge can be securely locked in for a long period of time, because annual contributions in themselves, fluctuating due to shortterm political and economic developments, will not create a dedicated path to decarbonization in the developing countries. Fourth, given the severity and urgency of the problem — namely, that global GHG emissions are still rising and as yet show no signs of abating — they must think carefully about the wisdom of increasing the value of their pledge substantially, since a larger amount will be needed to make a truly meaningful difference.