While the Paris Agreement achieved some milestones; it did not in climate finance. Assistance to poor countries, especially for adaptation to defend the livelihoods of their peoples against a warming climate, remains unfinished business. The future is bleak. Based on announcements made by developed countries last year, ECO has seen estimates that adaptation-specific support (if counted on grant or grant equivalent basis) is likely to be just US$6-9bn a year by 2020.
ECO’s hopes now lie in paragraph 114 of 1/CP.21 that urges developed countries to prepare a 2020 roadmap to demonstrate how they intend to meet the $100bn promise. Unless those countries intend to damage the good spirit we’ve seen in and since Paris, they ought to heed ECO’s advice and get working, so that COP22 can welcome a finalised roadmap. If ECO had a go at it, the roadmap would offer scenarios for the variety of instruments and channels available, and indicate how much annual adaptation support will amounted to by 2020. It’s a no-brainer that the roadmap would be prepared jointly with developing countries, starting at this week’s LTF workshop.
Then again, the value of roadmaps depends on how the finance itself is counted. Work on that front is spread across the agendas of all the three bodies. APA will work on the PA’s transparency framework, SBSTA is aiming to have an agreement on the modalities of the PA’s accounting of finance by 2018, and SBI is looking at the finance tables for the biennial reports.
A lot can be said about the need for a rigorous MRV system on climate finance, but let’s start with two fundamental points: count only those funds, or proportions thereof, that are specifically targeted at climate. And count only actual assistance, abandoning the bad practice of inflating numbers, by counting all sorts of instruments at face value. Luckily, developed countries expressed their firm intent to do so in the future (in footnote 44 of the OECD $100bn report), and count on the basis of provisions from budgetary sources and/or grant equivalents. ECO can’t wait to see the results.