Climate Corner (GREEN FUND ESTABLISHED)

GREEN FUND ESTABLISHED



Kwame Malcom at the recent climate change summit in Mexico



 By : Kwame Malcom

Delegates at the Cancún climate change summit have agreed to a framework for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and have established a new fund to help developing nations combat global warming.

While the agreements are small in scope, they mark a breakthrough in co-operation among the 193 signatories who last year made little headway at another UN climate-change summit at Copenhagen.

The Cancún Agreements establish the Green Climate Fund, a framework for providing billions of dollars in funding and technology to poor nations to stave off the threats posed by climate change. The fund will manage the annual $100 billion pledged to developing countries at the Copenhagen summit, money that is to be handed out beginning in 2020.

The agreements also call for further efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions, but contain no new hard targets for industrialized nations. The deals "recognized" targets recommended by scientists that call for industrialized countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 25 to 40 per cent of 1990 levels by 2020. Current agreements call for 16 per cent reductions.

The Climate Change Business Journal estimates the global climate change industry in 2010 to reach $380 billion in the U.S. and $960 billion worldwide by 2012.

The Cancún summit was billed as a last-chance saloon to save the UN climate change negotiations after a disastrous failure at Copenhagen in December 2009.

In the event, representatives of some 190 nations agreed to a compromise agreement which made some progress on issues, ranging from forest protection to the establishment of a $100 billion-a-year Green Fund for the developing world by 2020.

Details of how the commitments would be implemented, however, were not always thick on the ground.

The roots of the agreement were in EU texts submitted at the Copenhagen summit, such as the official goal of limiting global climate change to 2°C. But little progress was made on agreeing higher targets that would be in line with what science requires.

Developed countries like the United States and Japan are refusing to heed calls by representatives of developing countries such as Ghana at the on- going COP 16 summit on climate change in Cancún, Mexico, to cut emission levels.

This stance by developed countries is making the on –going summit in become a fiasco  as they are indicating that they will not accept or be party to any new negotiations for emission cuts and adhere to calls for good climate practices.

The most interesting aspect of the stance of the developed countries is that Japan, the venue where the Kyoto protocol was adopted in 2008 during the COP 14 summit, is the latest country to indicate that she will no longer abide by specific commitments adapted from the Kyoto protocol.

In an exclusive interview with the lead negotiator of developing countries at the summit, Dr Seth Osafo, legal advisor to the African group of negotiators of the United Nations Framework Convention On Climate Change (UNFCCC), he indicated that there is no progress being made.

He said that all the agreements under the Bali action plan involving mitigation action both by developed and developing countries, technology transfer from developed countries to developing countries as well as finance and knowledge transfer, are all not being adhered to by the developed countries.

Developed countries are indicating that on the issue of finance the pledge they made at Copenhagen that they will provide $ 10 billion each year from 2010 till 2012 for developing countries to use in their mitigation processes is what they are still abiding by. They are not, though, prepared to abide by any new pledges. However it is interesting to know that ever since these financial pledges were made  no developing country has received a dollar to date.

There is a raging debate as the developed countries are maintaining that they have provided the money they pledged and developing countries are vehemently denying this. Meanwhile the developed countries say they provided the money in the form of aid money for climate change activities to be undertaken in developing countries.  This has generated extreme debate at the summit, as the agreement requires that the money should be new, additional and predictable according to the terms under the finance clause of the agreement.

Another topic of debate is how adequate the money will be, according to Dr Seth Osafo. Dr Osafo suggests that one wonders how much each developing country out of the group of 77, or G77 as they are referred to, will get.

In addition, another issue of concern for Dr Osafo is the programme for adaptation, where most of the money that is provided is directed instead into mitigation, although adaptation is the priority for developing countries in Africa and elsewhere and this needs to be resolved as well.

He indicated that after the failure in Copenhagen at the COP 15, all efforts must be made to salvage the COP 16 on going in Cancún, Mexico, to make the impending COP 17 in Durban, South Africa worthwhile.