Tuesday, September 04, 2018

Should we be surprised?

Rich governments have promised $100 billion per year in climate finance by 2020 to help poorer nations make the transformation to clean energy and cope with the impact of higher temperatures. But developed countries are dragging their feet on meeting their pledges of billions of dollars to help developing nations tackle climate change, leaving poor nations with mounting costs from rising temperatures, rights groups said. Poor countries are struggling to cope with losses from floods and drought.

"Rich nations are attempting to escape full accountability for their role in causing and exacerbating climate change, and their obligation to deliver climate finance," said Lidy Nacpil of the Asian Peoples Movement on Debt and Development. "Inadequate climate finance compromises the capacity of the developing world to survive the climate crisis."

Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary, UN Climate Change explained, "Every year, the impacts of climate change are getting worse. This means that the poorest and most vulnerable, who have contributed almost nothing to the problem, suffer more." 

Experts say insufficient cash and board disagreements over key decisions are hampering the flagship Green Climate Fund (GCF) that was established at U.N. climate talks in 2010 to channel a substantial portion of the $100 billion per year wealthy nations had pledged. Of a total of more than $10 billion committed to the fund, since 2015 it has allocated about $3.5 billion for projects in 78 countries to curb heat-trapping emissions and adapt to more extreme weather and rising seas.

"The big fight is that while developed nations are focused on mitigation, developing countries need help with adaptation and loss and damage from floods, storms and drought," said Harjeet Singh of advocacy group ActionAid. "People are losing lives; we should not be focusing on trade agreements for solar panels and wind farms," he said.

http://news.trust.org/item/20180903134650-7vtct/

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