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…
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…
Successful examples for the Green Climate Fund from around the world UN climate watchers are eager to see what projects and programs the Green Climate Fund finances out of the starting gate. The implications of the initial project pipeline are big -- not only because they will set a precedent for future projects, but because they also set the stage for Paris. Ambitious, environmentally sound and socially just projects and programs will send the right…
Many governments and financial institutions support the deployment of “less dirty” fossil fuels to fight climate change both domestically and internationally, and claim this is a sane, sensible approach. Let’s try applying this logic to smoking. Here’s a scenario. A heavy smoker walks into her doctor’s office hacking up a lung. The doctor tells her patient that it’s fine to smoke, as long as the cigarettes are filtered. Ludicrous, right? The competence, let alone the…
Posted 10 December, 2014 on Environmental Finance
Last week, the UN Climate Summit in Lima, Peru, kicked off amid controversy with news that Japan had counted loans for coal projects in Indonesia as international climate finance. (Climate finance is the money developed countries owe to developing countries for climate mitigation and adaptation.)
This news was triply damning. First, Japan claimed that coal was climate-friendly. Second, Japan counted money lent to its own multinational corporations…
This year’s annual UN climate summit, known as the Conference of Parties or COP, has drawn to a close in Lima, Peru. In a disgraceful outcome predictable enough to be called a pattern, the COP once again failed to deliver what climate science and justice require to avert climate catastrophe.
The Pseudo-reality of the COPs
Like many COPs before it, the Lima meeting was awash in climate double-speak by rich countries -- most notably the…