This year has seen floods kill thousands of people in Libya and India, and typhoons have battered Asia. Disasters caused by climate change are on the rise, with many diplomats citing several that caused more than $30 billion in physical and economic losses in Pakistan alone last year.recent analysis by The Washington Post and Carbon Plan, a nonprofit climate research group. Researchers have shown that by 2030, 500 million people around the world, particularly in regions such as South Asia and the Middle East, will be exposed to dangerous heat, increasing the likelihood of heat-related death and illness.
The United Nations estimated last month that the global funding gap to deal with this onslaught is in the trillions of dollars. As Western countries begin to mobilize huge sums of money to help their countries transition to clean energy, government officials and other diplomats say poor and vulnerable countries, often those who need it most, are being left behind. Says.
Maldives Minister of Environment, Climate Change and Technology Khadija Naseem said 2023 was “disappointing”. This year's United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP28, is supposed to spur progress by assessing how far the world has come in tackling climate change. In fact, Naseem said, this year was a year in which they fell further behind.
“What is available is far less than what is needed,” Naseem said in a statement. “We are not able to keep up with the rapid response to disasters that occur one after another.”
Friction is rising at an international summit for global climate negotiations that begins in Dubai on November 30th. On Thursday, environmentalists and some diplomats criticized rich countries for providing just $9.3 billion to replenish the Green Climate Fund, which supports climate-friendly projects in development. At the Pledge Summit in Germany. The United States was one of the few countries to provide no new funding.
On Monday, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank will hold their annual meeting in Morocco, where African countries and others will press the institutions for reforms to boost climate financing. Advocacy group Glasgow Action Team has announced that billboards calling for climate justice will be installed across Glasgow. In Marrakech, vendors at the city's famous markets arrange their produce in ways that reinforce their message.
World Bank leaders said on Thursday that the organization would focus on financing to maintain a “liable planet,” while also focusing on poverty alleviation, according to a World Bank official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak. They plan to discuss how this can be tackled. On record.
The summit's chief executive, Adnan Amin, said finding ways to attract more funding, particularly from the private sector, was a top priority for COP28 leaders. But for negotiators, the lack of fulfillment in past funding commitments is among other issues.
The United States has provided just $2 billion of the $3 billion it pledged to the Green Climate Fund nine years ago.Congress just approved $1 billion of the $11.4 billion that President Biden personally promised to developing countries. The United States and other rich countries have pledged to provide $100 billion in public and private aid annually by 2020, but the shortfall currently stands at $17 billion annually.
Although China ranks among the world's largest carbon emitters, it has refused to join many of these commitments because it remains a developing country. And despite pledging $3.1 billion to poor countries, it has only delivered 10 percent of that money over seven years, according to estimates from climate think tank E3G.
And development banks have been unable to tap trillions of dollars in private sector loans, as officials in some rich and developing countries believe they should. For every dollar they provided in climate finance in 2021, they mobilized just 25% of private funding, according to an analysis of publicly available development bank data by the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute. It was cents.
“There is certainly a sense of disappointment, or perhaps more than disappointment,” said Amin, a Kenyan who previously served as director general of the International Renewable Energy Agency. “None of the funding promises have actually materialized in any meaningful way for climate action in the Global South.”
Many of the largest funding commitments come from the 2009 climate change talks in Copenhagen. Developing countries forced rich countries to pay because greenhouse gases emitted decades ago still linger in the atmosphere, accelerating extreme weather events and rising sea levels, often hitting poorer countries hardest. Body. These payment agreements helped pave the way for the Paris Climate Agreement a few years later.
But programs are often mired in delays and uncertainty. Former President Barack Obama helped launch the Green Climate Fund in 2014, pledging $3 billion. But two years later, Republicans took control of the White House and Congress and suspended U.S. payments.
The event, held Thursday in Bonn, Germany, was aimed at replenishing funds for the project. — This includes wetland restoration and underwriting energy efficiency bonds. — Britain, Germany, France and others provided billions more. However, the State Department said in a statement that further U.S. involvement has been put on hold due to a divided and deadlocked Congress in the midst of next year's budget deliberations.
“The United States continues to honor the President's promise to increase climate financing,” the statement said. “We are aware that for a variety of reasons some countries are not in a position to make commitments today, but we hope to hear from other countries soon in the lead-up to the Dubai Climate Conference. .”
Canada and Germany, which have led international efforts on climate financing plans since 2021, also said in a statement last month that they were “confident” about the pace at which rich countries meet their $100 billion annual climate aid pledges. ” However, they said that data to prove this would not be available until 2025.
We are still far short of the trillions of dollars needed for new clean energy development, according to last month's draft of the global “stocktake”, a formal assessment of world progress overseen by the United Nations in the run-up to COP28. . Some of its key findings were that funding of all types needed to be dramatically scaled up.
The recommendations still call on countries to redirect investment to high-carbon projects. Programs that include subsidies for fossil fuel consumption. These subsidies reached a record high last year, according to multiple watchdog groups. One group estimates that the world's 20 largest economies have provided more than $1 trillion in subsidies for the first time.
Such spending has infuriated developing countries that failed to join the G20. Countries want to pay into a new fund for the loss and damage that climate disasters have inflicted on poor countries. Countries agreed to create it in talks last year, but no agreement has been reached on who will pay for it and how much, a potential major hurdle for Dubai.
The fact that Western countries are increasing subsidies for their own clean energy projects without providing international support has also infuriated leaders of many developing countries. The roughly $370 billion Inflation Control Act passed last year was the largest climate bill ever approved by Washington and did not include money for overseas climate aid.
Michai Robertson, senior financial advisor for the Alliance of Small Island States, a group of 44 island and low-lying coastal states from around the world that works together in international climate negotiations, said the bill, also known as the Bill, has been introduced. I looked back on a discussion I had with a colleague at the time. The IRA was being discussed.
“Oh, what part of the IRA talks about international climate finance? Oh, nothing,” he said. “It's really unfair. And they can print money in their basements.”
U.S. officials have long cited the need for private sector intervention and said only investors can raise the trillions of dollars needed. And many diplomats from rich and poor countries say the gridlock at multilateral development banks is making private companies even more reluctant to invest.
Stephen Guilbeault, Canada's Minister of Environment and Climate Change, said the government could support more loan guarantees and other types of financing. small Government funding that removes project risk and raises large sums of money from private investors. However, he said that for now, the private sector remains one of the laggards.
“There's a disconnect,” Guilbeault said. “You listen [bank leaders] You know, there are billions of dollars ready to be invested, but it's not happening at the pace and scale that we need. ”
