Serious financial, social, environmental, and climate risks aside, the development of LNG in Mozambique has also been tangled up in a corruption scandal of international scale, and a devastating militarized conflict impacting over a million people.
As the Board of the Green Climate Fund prepares to consider its first high risk projects at the upcoming GCF meeting in South Korea October 12-14, more than 100 groups have issued the following statement to express deep concern about the inadequacy of policies and practices in place for financing activities of high social and/or environmental risk. Here's the statement.
Civil Society Statement, September 22, 2016 Concerns Regarding Green Climate Fund and Support…
I’ve just returned from attending the 13th meeting of the Board of the Green Climate Fund (GCF). Many of us GCF old-timers[1] can’t help but feel a sense of sincere disappointment. How can anyone who, perhaps naively, looked to the GCF as a people’s alternative to the World Bank not feel at least a bit deflated? Most of the GCF’s resources look to be captured by the same old, same old (i.e. World Bank,…
Ahead of this week's meeting of the trust funds of the World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds, 100 groups have called for the CIFs to finally sunset, now that the Green Climate Fund is clearly operational. Two-thirds of the groups are from developing countries.
Here's the letter.June 14, 2016
Dear Trust Fund Committee Members of the Strategic Climate Fund and Clean Technology Fund:
Now that it has approved projects and is beginning…
Either Wednesday or Thursday of this week, the Board of the Green Climate Fund will decide whether or not banking giants HSBC and Credit Agricole will become "accredited entities" of the GCF. Accredited entities are official partners of the GCF; they can receive and manage GCF funds. Here are five simple reasons why the GCF Board should reject their applications for accreditation. Number 1: Scarce public finance must be used to support communities in developing…
Originally posted on Environmental Finance At the Paris COP, it is hardly possible to overstate the importance of climate finance – the provision of funds by developed countries for developing countries to take climate action. This money is critical to show poor nations that rich nations are making good on years of promises to provide such funds – promises which have largely gone unfulfilled. It is also essential for negotiations in Paris to begin in…
Understanding The Story of Climate Finance is fundamental to understanding climate chaos, its high cost for poor countries and the role that the U.S. plays.
To help us all out, Friends of the Earth U.S. created an infographic which visualizes who is most responsible for climate change on a global scale (spoiler alert – the U.S.!); who gets hurt the most, what needs to be done, who should pay, where the money can come…
In light of the recent release of the OECD report, “Climate Finance in 2013-14 and the USD 100 billion goal,” and the finance ministerial that took place in Lima, Peru on Oct. 9 on the sidelines of the World Bank/International Monetary Fund annual meetings, 112 groups from around the world sent a letter to those developed country governments that last month issued the Joint Statement on Tracking Progress Towards the $100 billion Goal. The…
Last week, the US and China announced a “common vision” for tackling climate change, an announcement that was intended to generate political momentum in the run-up to the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change talks in Paris this December. One of the most notable portions of China’s commitment is an agreement “to work towards strictly controlling public investment flowing into projects with high pollution and carbon emissions both domestically and internationally.” This announcement…
Developing countries urgently need money -- and lots of it -- to address climate change. To tackle this tremendous challenge, the international community is looking to the newly established United Nations Green Climate Fund to be the primary channel for multilateral climate finance for the poor and the vulnerable in developing countries. But a recent meeting of the GCF board in Korea brought some worrying developments regarding how the fund will work and for whom.…