Academics have warned that promises by the world’s developed countries of billions of “new and additional” dollars to help developing nations tackle climate change is meaningless without a baseline from which to count new funds.
The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has published a report on Thursday, outlining two options for defining a baseline that would balance the demands of donor and recipient nations.
The paper will be formally launched on 5 June at a side event during the ongoing UN climate-change negotiations in Bonn.
The paper’s authors call for a UN-based system to define baselines and monitor pledges and payments. They say this must happen if developed nations are to regain the trust of developing nations that is essential for a global climate deal.
Last December, at the UN climate talks in Copenhagen, the industrialized nations committed to provide developing nations with US$30 billion of “new and additional” funding between 2010 and 2012, as well as US$100 billion per year by 2020.
But developing nations fear that to meet this promise, the developed countries will simply rename existing aid budgets or count previous pledges of climate finance.
“Funding from developed countries to help developing countries tackle climate change has the potential to re-build the lost trust between the two sets of countries — but only if it is done properly,” said Saleemul Huq, senior fellow in IIED’s climate change group. “Agreeing on baselines for assessing ‘new and additional’ climate funds is key.”
Co-author J. Timmons Roberts added: “When is a promise not a promise? When there’s no specified baseline that would allow anyone to know if the promise has been fulfilled. That’s the case with the Copenhagen Accord’s climate finance promise, and that’s why this issue needs immediate attention to get the negotiations back on track.”
“For mutual accountability, we need an international rule that any pledge has to be accompanied by a baseline.”
The report can be downloaded here.
