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Climate change funding faces cloudy prospects

Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Details of a massive transfer of $100 billion a year to cover the costs of global warming are being hammered out by officials from more than 40 countries meeting in Geneva 2 and 3 September. One of the few outcomes of the failed Copenhagen Climate Conference in December 2009 was a non-binding agreement by the rich world to fund the effects on poorer nations of climate change. The goal is to find long-term ways to cover those costs.

Delegates are haggling about the financing in an economic environment that is decidedly less promising than a few years ago. The European Union and the USA would prefer more funds to come from private enterprise; poorer countries are looking for transfers of public money, and expect massive increases in aid. Some want to reduce carbon emissions, others need the money urgently to mitigate the effects of dramatic climate change. The unusually heavy monsoon rains and the resulting flooding in Paksistan is just one dramatic example of the world’s changing climate.

Mexico hosts the next round of the climate change talks in November, and Switzerland has agreed to co-host this week’s more informal meeting on the various options open to countries. The talks are meant to find consensus on the contentious issues that caused the Copenhagen summit to fail. Emerging powerhouses like China, Brazil and India feel that a curb on their carbon emissions will stymie economic growth, and insist that the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now were put there by the rich world in the past century and a half. Smaller and poorer nations, such as Bangladesh or Pakistan, are subject to the direct effects of extreme weather; island nations in oceans that may rise significantly as a result of melting ice caps are threatened existentially.

Links to other sites: Bloomberg, Federal Office for the Environment, Le Temps,