HELPING DEVELOPING COUNTRIES to fight climate change, both for their own sake and the rest of the world’s, will require ramping up international finance to $1 trillion a year, hundreds of climate experts and charities have said.
Minister for Climate Eamon Ryan has said there is a “real risk” that negotiations on the new finance goal could fail.
Ireland is among countries sending officials to the COP29 climate conference in Azerbaijan this week to hammer out deals on climate action.
Negotiations will drill down decisions about mitigation (stopping climate change) and adaptation (protecting people and places from climate-change impacts) but the overwhelming focus at this COP is on climate finance: getting funds flowing to help developing countries that have contributed the least to climate change but are facing the worst of its impacts and are the least equipped to deal with it.
Analysis by the UN Standing Committee on Finance found nearly $6 trillion is needed to implement developing countries’ climate action plans by 2030.
Even that figure is believed to potentially be an underestimation of the amount of resources needed for developing countries to be able to carry out necessary mitigation and adaptation measures in response to climate change, a problem that has been largely created and driven by human activities in rich and developed countries but which more vulnerable countries are bearing the worst consequences of.
“The litmus test of success for this COP will be whether countries can come together and agree on a new global finance goal,” said Ross Fitzpatrick, Christian Aid Ireland’s Policy and Advocacy Officer.
Speaking to The Journal at COP29, Fitzpatrick said that developing countries “cannot commit to greater climate action plans without the finance to unlock it”.
Unless there’s a new, really ambitious goal, developing countries can’t realistically pay for all these measures that are needed to tackle climate change, because they already have masses and masses of debt.”
Fitzpatrick agreed with Eamon Ryan’s assessment that there is a risk the talks could fail.
“There have been preparatory negotiations on the goal for the last three years, a number of informal meetings between negotiators but also between ministers at various points over the last three years, and they have led to very little progress,” he said.
Under the Paris Agreement signed in 2015, countries need to agree this year on a new target for climate finance called the New Collective Quantified Goal (NCQG).
The last time a goal like this was set was in 2009, when developed countries pledged to donate $100 billion a year in climate finance.
However, it was only in 2022 that the target was potentially reached for the first time – and even that has been widely contested depending on the types of funding that are included to go towards calculating the total.
If high-income countries have failed for more than a decade and a half to reach a target of $100 billion a year, is there any hope of reaching the $1 trillion target in the years to come?
There has to be, is the position of climate activists, because failure would mean countless more lives and livelihoods lost and landscapes destroyed by climate change.
Speaking to The Journal at COP29, Shafqat Ullah, Senior Technical Advisor-Livelihoods at Concern Pakistan, described how climate change is already devastating for countries like Pakistan, where vast flooding in 2022 displaced the staggering number of 33 million people.
“I would like to convey a humble message to the community of developed countries and the donor agencies that they should take climate change as a serious issue,” Ullah said.
“We must have grant-based climate financing that is equitable, that is ambitious, and that is linked to the Sustainable Development Goals. My humble request is that we must have grant-based financing for the vulnerable communities like in Pakistan,” he said.
Getting global agreement on the target and how to reach it will be a challenging task for negotiators over the next two weeks.
“There is a real risk that these negotiations could fail and we will not find a path forward,” said Minister for Climate Eamon Ryan.
“It will be hard to get agreement in a world that is so divided and under such stress, but that is what we have to do,” he said.
“There is no other way but to get renewed support for the Paris Climate Agreement between the 194 countries who will attend.
Giving up would be unforgivable but success could help restore hope in our world. The prize is not just to stop runaway climate change but also to develop a new economy which delivers better sustainable development for all.”
Ryan, who was appointed by the COP presidency to co-facilitate talks on climate adaptation, which is closely linked to finance. He will facilitate the adaptation negotiations alongside Costa Rica’s Minister of Environment and Energy
Franz Tattenbach.
“It is a red line issue for the most vulnerable countries because it is the area where public finance is most needed and least available,” Ryan said.
“At an earlier negotiation round in Baku last month I heard a representative from the African Union make an impassioned plea: ‘We don’t want freebies but we do want fairness.’
“The key to success in the negotiations will be on building trust so that we can deliver such fairness, not just by determining how much more wealthier countries contribute, but also by agreeing on how the global banking system needs to change and how we can raise new innovative sources of finance, including private finance to deliver the trillions of euro in investment we know we need.”
The balancing act of where the financing comes from is expected to be a source of disagreement at the COP negotiations.
Options that might be preferred by rich countries, like bringing in private finance sources or loans, are seen by developing countries and charities as less useful or credible compared to more direct funding flows like bilateral agreements and grants.
The Climate Action Network (CAN), a large group of climate organisations, has said that when raising funds, developed countries should make sure that the costs are borne by those with the greatest capacities to pay, such as through taxes on polluters, profiteers of climate change, and the ultra-rich.
Taxing companies in high-emitting sectors like the fossil fuel industry and military industry should also be used to raise funds, the CAN said.
Additionally, developed countries should redirect subsidies or public spending currently used for fossil fuels or other high-emitting, harmful activities, it said.
Ross Fitzpatrick said that disagreements about which countries should be paying into the fund “has really stifled any meaningful progress to date”.
“There’s a lot of disagreement between countries as to who should foot the bill for for this goal,” he said.
“From our perspective, wealthy developed countries in the Global North have responsibility for causing the climate crisis and therefore have responsibility for paying for this. They are trying to introduce additional obligations on certain developing countries whose economies have grown over the past number of years and many developing countries see this as a of breach of trust and a way to distract attention from their own financial obligations,” Fitzpatrick explained.
“By and large, but whether or not China or Saudi Arabia or Qatar provide climate finance now doesn’t change the fact that the responsibility for most of this finance still rests with developed countries. It’s also important to point out that when you look at the last two to three decades, wealthy countries in the Global North have really failed to live up to their pre-existing financial obligations,” he said, referencing the missed $100 billion target.
Whether China – which has provided an average of $4.5 billion in climate finance per year between 2013 and 2022, according to the World Resources Institute – would be formally required to pay into climate funding pots is something that arose at similar negotiations last year and is a feature of discussions again this year.
However, lists of ‘developed’ and ‘developing’ countries that were created in 1992 that determine who pays and who benefits from this kind of funding are not likely to be changed at this COP – but a final deal could potentially say that in addition to developed nations, other countries with “capacity” should consider contributing.
The COP29 summit is taking place against the backdrop of ever-starker evidence of climate change and its devastating impacts.
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