About the Authors:
Katrin Enting, Senior Advisor – Climate Finance Strategies, Project International Climate Financing, Germanwatch
Sven Harmeling, Senior Advisor – Climate & Development, and Coordinator – Climate & Development in NRW, Germanwatch
Introduction
Climate Funding is one of the central subjects of discussion in the international climate policy debate. Germany plays an important role, since the country is partly responsible for climate change and has the responsibility to assist developing countries in the implementation of measures on climate protection and adaptation to support the consequences.
In this study, Germanwatch (a German NGO watching German and European politics regarding development, environment, and economics) and Bread for the World (a non-partisan, Christian citizens’ movement in the United States to end hunger) study some important aspects of climate funding. The study explains how German climate finance works and summarizes quantitative aspects of past delivery of climate finance, as well as analyzes Germany’s climate finance data for short-and long-term financing in accordance with the agreements of Copenhagen and Cancun.
The case of Germany also serves as evidence for many of the problems of climate funding – from the transparency of the additionality to the level of support given. But qualitative aspects are central: How is the money used? How are the most affected countries and communities prioritized? The study summarizes the findings with proposals for action for the German Federal Government.
Here, ThinktoSustain.com reproduces the Executive Summary of the study:
Executive Summary
The Challenge of Climate Change: Why International Climate Finance is Needed
An adequate and ambitious global response to avoid a dangerous or even catastrophic level of climate change, while managing to adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change, requires substantially increased investments. The additional costs of these responses are estimated to be well above US $ 100 billion already and are, thus, comparable to what is currently provided as Official Development Assistance (ODA).
The overall investments which need to be triggered are much higher. The provision of adequate, predictable, reliable, new and additional climate finance to developing countries to cover at least a significant share of these additional costs continues to be a crucial and controversial issue in the international climate and development policy arena.
Developed countries, like Germany, have a moral and legal obligation to provide such finance. It is enshrined in the UNFCCC itself (Articles 4.3 and 4.4), whereby Article 4.7 establishes a link between the extents to which developing countries take action on climate change and the finance they are provided with (UN 1992). Furthermore, it can be argued in view of international human rights law as being consecrated in the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Human Rights that the community of States is obliged to support the fulfillment of human rights – for example, the human right to food, or the human rights to water, housing and health in other States if they cannot, by themselves, ensure the fulfillment of these rights. This obligation to international co-operation is further interpreted as an “obligation to support the fulfillment of human rights” in other countries, as one of the so-called extra-territorial human rights obligations (OHCHR 2009, 27).
The massive and adverse impacts of climate change in many of the so-called “particularly vulnerable countries” means that these States have to shoulder the double burden of being geographically exposed to very high climate hazards (drought, flood, sea level raise) while simultaneously, due to their poverty, standing less resilient and, hence, notably vulnerable. It can be easily argued that these States in particular need to be supported by the community of States in order to fulfill basic human rights standards (food, water, housing, etc.), which are increasingly endangered through climate change.
Shortcomings in the Climate Finance Debate
The climate finance debate under UNFCCC has, for the past years, suffered from a number of central shortcomings – in particular, the lack of political will in developed countries to provide their fair and adequate share of the resources required. Furthermore, the following points are central:
- The lacking definition of what exactly to count as climate finance, which, e.g., in the context of the so-called Rio markers, has led to a significant level of over-coding of projects as being climate-relevant;
- The lacking quantification and voluntary nature of finance pledges, as well as insufficient reporting modes, which make it almost impossible to review compliance with past pledges;
- The lacking definition of what “new and additional” climate finance exactly means, which has resulted in a great deal of mistrust between developed and developing countries, as well as confusion due to a lack of transparency.
Expecting a significant increase in the resources provided to developing countries to address climate change, a first step in this regard has been indicated through the agreement reached in Copenhagen to mobilize annually US $ 100 billion by 2020 from developed countries.
