Developing countries to gain from new climate funding plan

By Nneka Nwogwugwu

Developing countries are set to benefit from a new climate funding plan to help them cope with the impacts of climate breakdown, in an effort to break the impasse between developed and developing countries at the UN COP26 climate summit.

The UK government, as COP26 host, have unveiled the proposals on Monday along with ministers from Germany and Canada, who have been charged with drawing up a plan for climate finance, needed to gain the backing of scores of developing countries for any deal at the talks, which open in Glasgow next Sunday.

The plan will propose meeting the $100bn by taking an average of the finance provided from 2020 to 2025, instead of single years. More of the money is expected to be devoted to adaptation, which helps the poorest countries more, rather than for cutting emissions, which tends to flow to middle-income countries.

However, the Cop26 climate finance plan is likely to be overshadowed by a row within the UK government over overseas aid, as the chancellor of the exchequer, Rishi Sunak, prepares fresh cuts to the UK’s aid budget in the comprehensive spending review on Wednesday, against the wishes of Cop26 supporters in the cabinet.

Poor countries have been promised since 2009 that by 2020 they would receive at least $100bn a year from public and private sector sources in richer countries to help them cut greenhouse gases and cope with the impacts of extreme weather.

But that promise has not been fulfilled and a report from the OECD last month found that in 2019, the latest year for which data is available, only about $80bn was provided.

The UK charged Germany and Canada with formulating the climate finance plan in an effort to draw from as wide a range of donors as possible. But it was also convenient to deflect attention from the UK’s own actions, in slashing overseas development aid from 0.7% of GDP to 0.5%, a cut of at least £4bn a year.