Rich nations urged to honour $10b climate funding pledges

Islamabad
Federal Minister for Climate Change Senator Mushahidullah Khan on Sunday urged rich countries to deliver on $10 billion climate finance pledges to the Green Climate Fund (GCF) made last year to meet costs of tackling climate change-induced disasters in poor countries.
The minister said the rich countries at UN-led donor conference last year on November 20 in Berlin, Germany, pledged a total $10.2 billion to GCF against informal target of $10 billion in initial capitalisation set by GCF to help developing countries tackle climate change.
“But, it is a matter of serious concern for developing countries that the rich countries have contributed so far only 42 per cent of the $10 billion,” he deplored in a statement.
Quoting an analysis published on April 30 by the GCF, the federal minister said the United States was overdue on $1.5 billion, Japan $750 million and Canada $130 million.
He said the head of the Unition Nations’ flagship GCF had recently warned that it could not kick off work as planned because leading backers including the US, Canada and Australia had not delivered funds.
“This means the GCF will have to hold back plans to back green energy projects in developing countries, including Pakistan, ahead of this year’s UN-led global climate summit to be held in Paris in December this year to agree on a global climate deal aimed at putting cap on carbon emissions to keep global emission rise to two degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels,” he said.
However, the minister cautioned that with inadequate financial resources and lack of technology, “we, developing countries, cannot fight the negative impacts of climate change, protect our economies and people from them.”
“Therefore, rich nations, including Austria, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Japan, US and UK, should honour their combined $10 billion financial pledges as early as possible, which they made during the last year’s UN-led donor conference,” he urged.
The GCF is a major part of a plan agreed in 2009, whereby rich countries agreed to mobilise $100 billion every year from 2020 from both public and private sources in the rich countries to help developing nations adapt to a changing global climate and reduce their own carbon emissions by boosting forest growth, energy-efficient urban transportation, shifting to renewable energies such as solar or wind and help them adapt to erratic weather patterns and their deleterious impacts.
The GCF - established in 2010 within the framework of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC ) - is a global funding mechanism to redistribute money from the developed to the developing world in order to assist the developing countries in adaptation and mitigation practices to counter debilitating impacts of climate change.
Over 198 countries - rich and poor - are signatories to the UNFCCC, which is an international environmental treaty that was opened for signature at the Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and came into force in 1994.