Reuters/AFP
Donor nations pledged up to $9.3bn yesterday to a UN fund to help developing countries tackle climate change, but environmental campaigners said the funds fell short of what they want.
The UN Green Climate Fund (GCF) is a major part of a plan agreed in 2009 whereby rich countries agreed to give $100bn a year from both public and private sources from 2020 to help developing nations reduce carbon emissions and adapt to a changing global climate.
The United Nations has set an informal target of $10bn in initial contributions for the GCF this year, a goal that Germany – host of yesterday’s conference – said was now within sight.
“I think everyone had hoped there would be more,” the World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said, noting however that he was “very encouraged” by the pledges.
Greenpeace hailed the pledges as “a first and important step” but rapped Australia, Russia and others for making none.
“While climate change is developing faster than expected, the financial support for those who are the most affected still evolves at a snail’s pace,” Greenpeace Germany’s political unit head, Stefan Krug, said.
Marlene Moses of Nauru, chair of the Alliance of Small Island States at UN climate negotiations, called the pledges “still well short” of the target.
Aid agency Oxfam called the total amount “a bare minimum” compared to the $10-15bn it and developing countries had called for.
“Financial support from developed countries should be a building block for a global climate agreement, not a stumbling block,” said the group’s Alison Woodhead. “Many developed countries have stepped up to give the Green Climate Fund a chance to get on its feet, but more is needed for it to succeed.”
The pledges are seen as vital to pave the way for a UN climate deal meant to be agreed in late 2015 in Paris.
That deal will aim to limit a rise in average global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times.
Temperatures have already risen by about 0.9°C and are in part to blame for disasters such as heatwaves, mudslides and rising sea levels, scientists say.
Yesterday’s pledges included money that had already been announced, such as up to $1.5bn from Japan and up to $3bn from the United States.
New pledges included $1.1bn from Britain and $310mn from Italy.
Officials said they expected Canada to join in by the end of the year and hoped Austria and Belgium would also contribute.
“This is a very important historic day,” GCF’s executive director, Hela Cheikhrouhou, said, describing the conference as “very fruitful”.
The head of the South Korea-based GCF said the money would be spent equally on climate change adaptation and reducing emissions, much of it for vulnerable small island nations and Africa’s poorest countries.
She said raising the billions in pledges had created “renewed trust and enthusiasm” ahead of international talks in Peru next month, and in France a year later, on slashing worldwide carbon emissions.
British economist and climate change expert Nicholas Stern welcomed the contributions and said “overseas aid for developing countries to make the transition to low-carbon economic development and growth helps to reduce poverty and to secure a cleaner and safer future for everyone”.
The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned this month that time is running out to limit warming to 2° Celsius (3.6° Fahrenheit) by 2100 from pre-industrial levels.
Instead, they said the Earth is on a trajectory to warm up by at least 4° Celsius – a recipe for melting ice caps, extreme weather events, habitat and species loss and conflict for resources.
After years that saw little progress in climate talks, the world’s two biggest economies and top polluters, China and the United States, this month agreed to new targets.
At a Beijing meeting, President Barack Obama committed the United States to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 26-28% by 2025 compared to two decades earlier.
China, the world’s top polluter, agreed for the first time to slow emissions growth and ultimately reverse it after emissions peak “around 2030”.
The 28-nation European Union, the third-largest greenhouse gas producer, has pledged to cut its emissions by at least 40% by 2030 from 1990 levels.