IIED bemoans lack of transparency on Copenhagen promises
By Kabanda Chulu
Wed 28 Sep. 2011, 13:20 CAT
Developed countries are far from being transparent about the climate-change finance they promised to developing nations at the Copenhagen summit in 2009, according to a scorecard published by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
The IIED scorecard assesses how transparent countries have been in the delivery of US$ 30 billion of ‘new and additional' funds, which they agreed to provide to developing countries between 2010 and 2012.
Norway ranked top on the scorecard but with a score of only 52 per cent while New Zealand came last with just 26 per cent.
"The generally low scores unveils progress in some areas and show that countries are not consistent in being transparent about all aspects of their funding," it stated.
"The overall lack of transparency hinders efforts to monitor where the money goes and ensure it is spent responsibly. It also means recipient countries may struggle to plan their responses to climate change."
One of the authors David Ciplet stated that a transparent system for reporting on climate finance was essential to make sure that funds were adequate, predictable and used responsibly.
"Greater transparency will be critical to building trust in the international negotiations towards a global agreement on how to tackle climate change," he stated.
Another author Dr Saleemul Huq stated that transparency was as important for the taxpayers in the North as it was for climate-vulnerable countries in the South.
"Transparent reporting is essential to enable recipient countries to plan their responses to climate change and for civil society to hold governments to account on their promises," stated Dr Huq.
Labels: ENVIRONMENT, IIED
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Rich states have failed the poor - IIED
By Kabanda Chulu in Kitwe
Thu 25 Nov. 2010, 04:00 CAT
INTERNATIONAL Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) has accused rich nations of failing to keep the Copenhagen promise to help poor nations adapt to climate change.
At the 2009 climate change summit in Copenhagen, Denmark, developed countries committed to provide developing nations with US $30 billion between 2010 and 2012, with the money balanced between funding for mitigation and adaptation projects.
But in a report released ahead of the next session of UN climate-change negotiations, which begins on November 29, 2010 in Cancun, Mexico, IIED stated that its research showed that the developed countries had failed to meet their responsibility to help poorer nations.
“Our research shows that developed nations are failing to keep the promise they made last year to provide adequate finance to help the world’s poorest countries adapt to the impacts of climate change. Funding pledges made since the Copenhagen meeting are far from balanced, with very little earmarked for projects that will enable developing nations to enhance their resilience to climate-change impacts on agriculture, infrastructure, health and livelihoods,” it stated.
“Only US $3 billion has been formally allocated for adaptation and there is also a danger that some of this could come in the form of loans which will further indebt already poor nations and force them to pay to fix a problem that the developed nations created.”
The report further warned that it was also unclear how the money will be disbursed, what type of projects it will support, and how the global community will be able to track adherence to pledges and ensure that the funding was truly new and additional to existing aid budgets.
“Currently there is no common framework to oversee, account for and enforce the delivery of the money that rich nations promised to support adaptation to climate change in developing nations,” it stated.
“Industrialised nations seem to think they can get away with an ‘anything goes’ approach where whatever they describe as adaptation funding counts and the danger is that existing development projects that are not specific responses to the threat of climate change will simply be relabelled as climate adaptation projects.”
IIED advised that to rebuild trust on both sides of the North-South divide, industrialised countries should support an independent registry under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and then provide it with detailed and timely data on all their climate-related projects.
Labels: CLIMATE CHANGE, DONORS, IIED
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