Megan Rowling
As the United States officially re-enters the Paris climate accord, expectations are rising that Washington will step up funding to help poor countries adopt clean energy and adapt to more extreme weather as the planet warms.
Under climate-change sceptic Donald Trump, the US government did provide finance for things like building solar power systems in Africa and protecting people from storms and floods in Asia, as part of its international development aid.
But Trump pulled out of the 2015 Paris Agreement and refused to deliver two-thirds of a $3-billion pledge made by his predecessor to the Green Climate Fund, set up under UN climate talks to help developing nations tackle global warming.
Environmental groups this week delivered a petition signed by more than 50,000 US residents, urging the administration under new US President Joe Biden to do its “fair share” in cutting emissions and providing climate finance.
Brandon Wu, director of policy for ActionAid USA, said that, as the biggest long-term contributor to climate-heating emissions, the United States had a moral and legal responsibility to help vulnerable communities now bearing the brunt of extreme weather and rising seas in a warming world.
“Doing our fair share of climate action means addressing the injustices we have visited on those communities — starting with providing real financial support for just and equitable climate action in developing countries,” he said in a statement.
Earlier this month, ActionAid and 45 other development agencies and green groups issued an open letter calling on Biden’s government to pledge and support appropriation of at least $8 billion for the Green Climate Fund.
That amount includes the $2 billion owed plus a doubling of the initial US pledge for the coming three years, in line with commitments by other wealthy governments such as France and Germany.
The groups also said the US government should provide $400 million over four years to the smaller Adaptation Fund, another UN-linked fund that boosts climate resilience in poor nations. That would mark a first-ever US contribution to the fund.
Hopes are high that Biden’s government will make up for lost time after US climate envoy John Kerry promised in January his country would “make good” on its climate finance promise, without specifying when or how. Most experts took that to mean the United States would deliver the money Trump withheld from the Green Climate Fund. In an executive order on climate change, signed on January 27, Biden also instructed government departments to craft a climate finance plan to help developing countries reduce emissions, protect critical ecosystems and build resilience to climate change impacts.
The plan is due to be submitted by the end of April, but experts hope it will land before a leaders’ climate summit Biden has convened for major-emitting nations on April 22.
Joe Thwaites, a sustainable finance associate at the Washington-based World Resources Institute, said commitments to specific climate funds could be announced before or in the plan, but it should also give a broader view of how the United States intends to approach climate finance over Biden’s term.
That would help other countries know what to expect in terms of levels of financial support and where it will go, he added.
“That makes it much easier to plan,” he said — both for those seeking to receive the money and for donors working out where best to add value with their own assistance.
A lack of climate finance, particularly that reaching the most vulnerable countries, has been a big sticking point in UN climate negotiations.
— Thomson Reuters Foundation
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