Climate Finance Post-Copenhagen

The $100 billion questions

Climate change is the single greatest threat to development – making the battle to overcome poverty ever harder and more expensive. Finance is urgently needed to help vulnerable communities adapt to a changing climate.
At Copenhagen, there was progress on finance, if limited. The Copenhagen Accord proposed the establishment of a ‘Copenhagen Green Climate Fund’ and included a loose pledge from rich countries to ‘mobilize’ $100 billion a year by 2020.
The UN Secretary General has convened a High Level Advisory Group on Climate Financing (AGF) to recommend – ahead of the UN climate meeting in Mexico in December 2010 – how the money can be raised. Their interim report will be discussed at June’s UNFCCC meeting in Bonn – the first round of substantive negotiations since Copenhagen.
In this note, Oxfam raises the key questions that the AGF needs to tackle to ensure sufficient and sustainable sources of finance for climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Key recommendations

Leading up to UN climate meeting in Mexico in December 2010, world governments have the opportunity to turn ambiguity into action by agreeing:

  • A UN Green Fund that is transparent, accessible and direct;
  • To bring a package of predictable and sustainable climate finance sources on-stream by 2013, worth at least $100bn a year to help poor people cope with climate change.

To rebuild trust between rich and poor nations and put the negotiations back on track towards a comprehensive deal, these issues must be formally agreed under the UNFCCC at COP-16 in Mexico in December 2010.