AS Climate Change negotiations begin on Monday in Doha, Qatar, a study has revealed how rich and industralised countries renege on previous pledges. The research listed eight unfulfilled promises on climate finance.
The study, The Guardian gathered, is the most detailed analysis to date of how well, or otherwise, rich nations have kept promises to provide poorer ones with funds to tackle climate change.
Incidentally, it would be officially released tomorrow to coincide with the formal opening of negotiations.
The research concludes that they have collectively failed to fulfill eight substantive pledges.
The 18th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the 8th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP18 and CMP8) serving as the Meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol will run through to Friday, December 7, 2012 at the Qatar National Convention Centre in Doha.
Published by the International Institute for Environment and Development, the study comes as countries prepare for the latest round of intergovernmental climate-change negotiations, which begin next week in Doha.
The wealthier nations promised in 2009 to provide developing countries with US$30 billion by the end of 2012, and said this should be "new and additional" finance balanced between support for adaptation and mitigation activities. They made additional pledges about transparency, governance and the need to help the most vulnerable nations first.
But so far, only US$23.6 billion of the US$30 billion promised has been committed. And only 20 per cent of the fast start finance has been allocated to projects that will help poor nations adapt to a changing climate.
Less than half of the fast start finance is in the form of grants. The rest is loans, which means poor countries must repay with interest– the cost of adapting to a problem they have not caused.
Also, rich nations have not provided enough transparent information to prove that their contributions are really new and not just diverted from existing aid budgets.
To examine transparency in more detail, the researchers evaluated donor nations across 24 measures. On the resulting scorecard, no donor nation scored more than 67 per cent.
