Hi John,
Boris Johnson has called on rich countries to pledge more climate finance ahead of COP26, but the UK is well short of paying its fair share.
This week at the UN, our prime minister tried to show off his ‘climate leadership’ credentials by hectoring world leaders to increase climate finance commitments, while announcing that the UK will increase its own contributions in the next five years.
The catch? At $3.2 billion a year, the UK’s climate finance commitments still fall well short of what southern leaders argue would be our “fair share” based on the UK’s historic contributions to climate change.
Even worse, this funding isn’t “new and additional” as the UN requires it to be, but will instead be raided from the UK aid budget, which the government has already cut by £4 billion this year.
Instead of dodgy accounting and false promises, the global south needs urgent climate finance and debt cancellation to support efforts to prevent and adapt to climate change.
Join us in calling on the UK to pay its fair share of climate finance, and to agree a new deal at COP26 with other rich countries to do the same.
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What is a fair share of climate finance?
In 2010, rich governments agreed to collectively pay the global south $100 billion a year in climate finance by 2020. This funding was designed to account for the historic carbon emissions of the global north and to support the global south to decarbonise and adapt to climate change.
However, the $100 billion target was always contested as being far too little to compensate for the north’s historic contribution to climate change. Even then, they used the Paris Agreement to give themselves another five years to meet the target.
Alternative calculations by global south leaders argue that the UK alone should instead be paying $46 billion a year to the global south in climate finance. While this sounds like a lot, it is less than 1.5% of annual national income, and would save a lot of money in terms of dealing with the impacts of climate chaos in the long term.
The UK’s recent pledge to increase climate finance to $3.2 billion a year, and President Biden’s announcement this week that the US will contribute $11 billion a year (the US’s fair share is $80 billion) remain well short of what is needed.
It’s time for rich countries to pay up.
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Dodgy accounting
But a lack of ambition is not the only problem with these pledges.
Firstly, there are a raft of ways in which rich countries overcount the finance they are contributing. In 2018, when the OECD said that the global north was making good progress to the $100 billion target by providing $79 billion that year, Oxfam figures suggested the true value was only $20 billion.
That is partly because 74% of this finance was provided as loans, not grants. That means governments were counting money that they would eventually get back as assistance to the global south.
Furthermore, the funding is meant to be new and additional. In contrast, the UK has consistently raided the aid budget to provide climate finance, when the two must stay separate.
As one Indian government ministry put it, the UK is robbing Peter to pay Paul, and putting vital aid-backed services in healthcare and education at risk through its approach to climate finance.
Time for a new deal
We need to call out the UK’s climate hypocrisy before, during and at COP26. It’s time that the UK paid up and contributed its fair share of climate finance. But our government should also use its COP presidency to push other rich countries to agree a new climate finance deal that represents equity and justice for the global south.
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Thank you for your support,
Daniel Willis
Climate campaigner at Global Justice Now
READ MORE
1: Financing justice? UK climate finance and how to increase ambition at COP26, September 2021: https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/resource/financing-justice-uk-climate-finance-and-how-to-increase-ambition-at-cop26/
2. ‘There is no climate justice without debt justice’, Daniel Willis, September 2021: https://www.globaljustice.org.uk/blog/2021/09/there-is-no-climate-justice-without-debt-justice/
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