For a storm-prone developing country such as the Philippines, receiving international funding to protect its people from wild weather and adopt clean energy is not only an issue of global justice, the money is essential to deliver on its climate plan.
Without promised support, many vulnerable poorer nations — battered by the economic impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and surging climate disasters — say they simply cannot take more aggressive action to cut planet-heating emissions or adapt to a warmer world.
The Philippines, for example, has pledged to reduce its emissions 75 percent below business-as-usual levels by 2030.
Illustration: Mountain People
However, only about 3 percentage points of that commitment can be delivered with its own resources, its national climate plan says.
The rest would require international finance to make sectors such as farming, industry, transport and energy greener.
“Environmental groups say our [target] is unambitious because it’s highly conditional,” Philippine Department of Finance spokeswoman Paola Alvarez said. “What they don’t see, however, is what we submitted is what is doable for the Philippines.”
“Our economy is not doing well because of the pandemic and we have back-to-back typhoons every now and then,” which means national resources need to be prioritized for social programs, Alvarez told reporters.
As leaders attend the UN General Assembly in New York this week, wealthy nations are coming under ever-greater pressure to deliver on an unmet pledge, made in 2009, to channel US$100 billion a year to poor countries to tackle climate change.
With budgets worldwide squeezed by the COVID-19 crisis and UN climate talks postponed for a year, the original deadline last year to meet the goal was likely missed, analysts have said.
However, as November’s COP26 climate summit approaches, time is running out to convince developing countries — big and small emitters — that any efforts at home to raise their climate game will be met with solid financial backing, analysts say.
Alden Meyer, a senior associate in Washington for think tank E3G, which is focused on accelerating a low-carbon transition, said that the US$100 billion promise is well below what is actually needed by emerging economies to mount an adequate response.
However, delivering on it is key to spurring them on, Meyer said.
Right now, they can say: “The developed countries aren’t doing what they said they would do in terms of support, so why should we ramp up ambition” to cut emissions? Meyer said.
Government officials in India — the world’s fourth-biggest emitter of planet-heating gases — have said, for example, that any further commitment to reduce its carbon footprint would depend on funding from rich countries.
National pledges to cut emissions so far are inadequate to keep global temperature rise to “well below” 2°C above pre-industrial times, and ideally to 1.5°C, as about 195 countries committed to under the 2015 Paris Agreement.
The UN climate science panel warned in a report last month that global warming is dangerously close to spiraling out of control and will bring climate disruption globally for decades to come, in wealthy countries as well as poor ones.
Some big greenhouse gas emitters, including China, Russia and India, have yet to submit more ambitious plans to the UN, as they committed to do by last year under the Paris pact.
Of the roughly 110 plans delivered by other countries ahead of an adjusted UN deadline in July, nearly all hinge on one key condition: Money.
According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), a US-based think tank that tracks national climate pledges, “well over half” of those updated emissions goals include actions that can only happen with the support of international finance.
“This underscores why it’s so critical for developed countries to deliver on their [US]$100 billion pledge. It’s the bare minimum,” said Taryn Fransen, a climate policy expert at WRI.
In the latest submissions, a growing number of developing nations have stepped up with emissions goals they can implement on their own, including Argentina, Chile and Colombia, which have dropped requests for support entirely, Fransen said.
However, honoring the US$100 billion annual commitment — which covers the five years until 2025, when a new yet-to-be-negotiated goal is set to begin — is key to fostering trust within the global climate talks and facilitating a faster green transition, she said.
The latest figures from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, released on Friday last week, showed that in 2019, donor governments channeled US$79.6 billion to vulnerable countries, up just 2 percent from US$78.3 billion in 2018.
An analysis by aid charity Oxfam put the real figure for 2018 — when counting only grants and not loans that have to be paid back — much lower, at US$19 billion to US$22.5 billion.
Meanwhile, the 46 least-developed countries between 2014 and 2018 received just US$5.9 billion in total for adaptation, a level that would cover less than 3 percent of the funds they need this decade, the International Institute for Environment and Development said in a study released in July.
Climate and development experts say that industrialized countries built their prosperity by burning fossil fuels, making them responsible for a large part of the losses happening in countries on the front lines of floods, droughts, storms and rising seas, many of them in the southern hemisphere.
A study last year in The Lancet Planetary Health journal estimated that, as of 2015, nations in the global north were responsible for 92 percent of carbon emissions beyond safe levels for the planet, while the global south accounted for just 8 percent.
Diann Black-Layne from the Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda, which is battling sea-level rise and more frequent hurricanes, said that climate action for developing countries “has to be conditional, because we can’t get the money.”
Black-Layne, lead climate negotiator for the 39-member Alliance of Small Island States, asked why wealthy governments continued to fund the fossil-fuel industry while failing to meet their US$100 billion-a-year pledge.
“That money is available,” she said. “There is no shortage of money to get us to the 1.5°C” temperature goal.
Ahead of the COP26 summit, which starts on Oct. 31, host nation Britain has tasked Germany and Canada with coming up with a delivery plan for the elusive US$100 billion a year, but observers believe that is unlikely to land until next month.
UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa on Friday last week told journalists that the outstanding US$20 billion was a “very, very big issue,” and resolving it was key for building trust in the negotiations and enabling developing nations to implement their climate action plans. Espinosa said that she had not lost hope that “we will somehow see” the money coming together in time for COP26.
A recent analysis from the Overseas Development Institute said that the US should be stumping up more than US$43 billion a year based on cumulative carbon emissions, gross national income and population size.
It called the US the biggest offender among 23 donor states in terms of falling short of its responsibilities.
On Wednesday last week, the EU pledged to boost the US$25 billion per year it provides in climate funding to poorer countries by 4 billion euros (US$4.7 billion) through 2027 and called on the US to step up too.
Laurence Tubiana, chief executive officer of the European Climate Foundation and a key broker of the Paris Agreement, last week said that “serious pledges” were now needed from Washington given that some European nations had already raised their commitments.
“The US must step up solidarity,” Tubiana said, adding that she understood Washington was working hard to do so.
Thomson Reuters Foundation is the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters. It covers the lives of people around the world who struggle to live freely or fairly.
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