Designing the Green Climate Fund: How to Spend $100 Billion Sensibly by Lorrae van Kerkhoff, Imran Habib Ahmad, Jamie Pittock and Will Steffen
Confronting and responding to climate change is one of the foremost issues of our time, with the burden of response spread unequally around the globe. In general, climate impacts are hitting, and will continue to hit, both developed and developing worlds. However, developing and less developed countries will be affected more quickly and emphatically than the industrialized world. Although it is widely acknowledged and provisioned under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that industrialized countries must assume a large share of the global emission reduction target, adapting to the existing and future consequences of climate change will be a greater challenge for developing countries. In recognition of this, in 2009 developed countries proposed a fund of up to US$100 billion per year to help developing countries mitigate and adapt to climate change. This funding target of $100 billion was reaffirmed and agreed in Cancun at the 16th Conference of Parties meeting to the UNFCCC in December 2010. While the funding sources included under the Cancun agreement include public, private, bilateral, and multilateral (including alternative) sources, the agreement also specifies that a significant share of new funding for adaptation will flow through the proposed Green Climate Fund (the Fund). Yet proposing and agreeing to such a fund are only early steps in what is now the difficult task of designing how such a major financing initiative might operate. The agreement poses that the institutional rules will need to meet the criteria of efficiency, equity, and equality. These rules will be critical to the success of the Fund, not only in meeting its administrative and fiduciary mandate, but in structuring the ways in which poor countries can govern for climate adaptation. In this article we focus on the question of how any such financing mechanism could be designed in ways that effectively support and enhance efforts to respond to climate change, particularly among the most vulnerable and poorly resourced countries across the globe. We do not dwell on questions of whether the amount is enough,1 or the politics surrounding the development of the Fund, given the wide range of North–South views on both issues. We examine precedents that offer both positive lessons (what can we try to emulate?) and warning signs (mistakes to avoid), and draw from these some key recommendations for the development of the Green Climate Fund. Full paper available in the May/June 2011 version of Environment Magazine available at: http://www.environmentmagazine.org/Archives/Back%20Issues/2011/May-June%202011/green-climate-fund-full.html Imran Habib Ahmad PhD Scholar Fenner School of Environment and Society Australian National University CANBERRA ACT 0200
