As the stage is set for the upcoming United Nations Climate Change conference in Glasgow, climate finance is one of the four major issues b...
As the stage is set for the upcoming United Nations Climate Change conference in Glasgow, climate finance is one of the four major issues before the summit. According to the latest assessment, the developed countries are falling behind on their commitment to mobilise $100 billion in climate finance annually by 2020.
There are many complexities within this target and its measurement. The jury is still out on what exactly counts as climate finance, and how it is mobilised.
Missing dimension
A lot of this discussion is quite high profile and under relatively high public scrutiny. But one critical dimension still missing from the public discourse is this: how to use this climate finance.
This “how” hits at a fundamental reason for the use of public climate finance: public finance is to be used to spur actions that will in turn lead to a wholesale transformation in economic, financial and social systems where every action is climate positive.
One of the three objectives of the Paris Agreement is “making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development” (popularly called Article 2.1c). This, according to COP26 Private Finance Hub, would need us to: “ensure that every professional financial decision takes climate change into account”.
The artificial target of...
