Getting the big bucks from Lima to Paris: finance in the INDCs

In the UNFCCC circus, ECO rarely favours one Party and its views over another. But this week, ECO is tempted to make an exception on finance. ECO secretly hopes that the AILAC submission on INDCs has been every negotiators’ bed-time reading last night in preparation for this morning’s ADP session on finance and the INDCs. AILAC’s submission helpfully suggests that for developed countries, and for countries with comparable levels of responsibility and capability, providing international climate finance (e.g. to support mitigation in other countries) is part of their fair share in the global effort, as much as it is their commitment to cut their own emissions too. Providing climate finance is not charity, nor is there a choice to opt out.

Once this is more widely understood in these halls (and ECO stands ready to help that cause), the next logical step is ensuring that such information on supporting mitigation through finance or means of implementation appears somewhere. That way, it’s easier to assess the adequacy and equity of overall contributions. ECO notes the clever system AILAC has come up with: INDCs to include information on policies and measures taken by countries to contribute to a yet-to-be-defined global target for the means of implementation in the 2015 agreement. Going further, ECO would propose, and so does AILAC, to complement it with details on expected forthcoming annual financial contributions and information on channels and instruments (e.g. multilateral funds) chosen by countries towards the collective target.

It comes as no surprise that developed countries are less inclined to agree to all of this, at least not quite yet. ECO wonders why, because in order to understand if we’re all doing enough and if everyone is committing their fair share, we need to know what everyone is doing on mitigation at home, as well as how they’re supporting mitigation elsewhere. If the INDCs aren’t the right place for it, then ECO wonders where developed countries plan to have that conversation instead. Perhaps developed countries are more excited about setting a collective target, perhaps disaggregated into 3 sub-targets for mitigation, adaptation and loss and damage. ECO insists that these targets be about public finance as a key lesson learnt from the fuzziness of the $100 billion goal. This could then be backed up with more concrete commitments to contribute to those targets and regular pledging (multi-year pledges were possible during the fast start period, remember?), and processes to assess progress towards meeting those collective goals.

ECO will be listening carefully to what developed countries are going to offer this morning on the matter – and, is prepared to follow up on it later this week.