At COP26, a consensus that developing nations need far more help countering climate change
When the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference ended in overtime two weeks ago, there was recognition that developing nations—which have contributed least but suffer most from climate change—need far greater funding to adapt.
At COP15, held in 2009 in Copenhagen, the world’s wealthiest countries pledged to give poorer nations yearly climate funding, to reach an amount of at least $100 billion a year from 2020 through 2025. The $100 billion figure was a nice, round number, but nothing about reaching this goal in the intervening years has been simple, especially after early 2020, when the global Covid-19 pandemic decreased international climate assistance to, and domestic climate allocations by, developing nations.
Donors routinely inflate their actual contributions, there is no accepted standard for what types of projects count toward “climate action,” and funding can be difficult to account for, vanishing somewhere between donor and project.
Further, funding from wealthy nations in 2019 was just short of $80 billion. Because of the complexity involved with tracking funds, there is roughly a two-year time lag in determining global contributions. [Continue reading…]