More Facts and Figures from the 2014 Biennial Assessment and Overview of Climate Finance Flows Report:
- Global total flows: Most climate finance in 2011/2012 is raised and spent at home – in developed countries 80 per cent of the funds deployed for climate action are raised domestically.
- The same pattern is seen in developing countries where just over 71 per cent comes from national sources.
- Around 95 per cent of global total climate finance is spent on mitigation or cutting emissions with 5 per cent on adaptation.
- Subsidies for oil and gas and investments in fossil fuel-fired generation are almost double the global finance for addressing climate change.
- Flows from developed to developing countries: Multiple sources were involved in providing funding to support climate action in developing countries ranging from Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) and Overseas Development Assistance (ODA) to multilateral climate funds – including funds administered by the Operating Entities of the Financial Mechanism of the Convention and the Kyoto Protocol.
- For example, finance from MDBs is around between $15 and $23 billion annually; multilateral climate funds including via the Global Environment Facility (GEF) were about $1.5 billion, including those linked to the UNFCCC at about $0.6 billion a year.
- 48 to 78 per cent of finance is reported as fast-start finance (2010-2012), in Biennial Reports (2011-2012), through multilateral climate funds, and through MDBs supports mitigation, or other/multiple objectives (6 to 41 per cent)
- Adaptation finance in the same sources ranges from 11 per cent to 24 per cent.
Click here to read/download the Full Assessment.
Source: UNFCCC.
Notes:
The assessment has tried to identify the flows to various sectors and initiatives – real precision in this area will have to await future assessments and the numbers need to be treated with caution.
Adaptation Investments Unclear
Assessing investments in adaptation is particularly difficult often because they can form part of a larger project such as an investment in a port of water supply system.
Meanwhile, there is also no universal operational definition of what constitutes adaptation and in addition publicly funded adaptation actions within countries – both developed and developing – is rarely reported or available.
As a result, flows from developed to developing countries are not really known with precision.
About UNFCCC
With 196 Parties, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is an international environmental treaty, which has near universal membership and is the parent treaty of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto Protocol has been ratified by 192 of the UNFCCC Parties. For the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol, 37 States, consisting of highly industrialized countries and countries undergoing the process of transition to a market economy, have legally binding emission limitation and reduction commitments. In Doha in 2012, the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol adopted an amendment to the Kyoto Protocol, which establishes the second commitment period under the Protocol. The ultimate objective of both treaties is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system.
