August may be a month of vacation of many, but ECO is thrilled that developed countries are spending these months working on their roadmap, instead of their tans. It’s great that Parties want to show how they will fulfil their $100-billion-a-year-from-2020 promise.
An obvious starting point is to provide projections as to how levels of public and private finance will increase. Given that there will be a temptation to just extrapolate some shiny figures derived through questionable accounting methods, ECO suggests that, in both cases, public finance and mobilised private finance, should be accounted for through robust annual plans on how these levels will be reached. Don’t even think of simply applying some random leverage factors or anything of that sort from old trick tool box.
The roadmap should spell out scenarios for different sources, instruments and channels to back up the projections. It could also be an opportunity to show how it is possible to overcome existing barriers to achieve such scenarios, for example through massive support for capacity building and readiness measures, and accelerating implementation of direct access models for accessing finance.
For ECO, and more importantly all those severely affected countries in urgent need of adaptation, it would be a real downer if the roadmap were not to include a projection on how adaptation finance will increase significantly over the next couple of years, following the call from Paris. The roadmap should include a target level for the amount of annual adaptation finance to be reached by 2020.