2023-11-30 21:00:12
As COP28 opens and the consequences of climate change are increasingly felt in our lives, observers are preparing to focus their attention on the promises of funding dedicated to the fight against climate change, which have become the compass of the ambition of those in power.
Make no mistake: this climate financing is an absolute necessity. The richest industrial countries on the planet have been the biggest emitters of carbon for decades. The four main emitters (China, United States, European Union of 27 and India) contributed to more than 55% of total emissions over the last decade. In 2020, all G20 countries represent 75% of global emissions.
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The most basic concern for climate justice, like the simple search for effectiveness in the global fight against global warming, obviously requires organizing a redistribution on a global scale of part of the wealth of rich countries to poor countries, which are often the most vulnerable to its consequences.
In 2009, industrialized countries set the objective of mobilizing 100 billion dollars per year for developing countries in the fight against climate change. This objective was already unambitious given the challenges, and almost ridiculous in comparison to other priorities: for the year 2021 alone, the volume of military spending by these same countries alone was twelve times greater.
$343 billion
However, if the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) announces that these 100 billion annual dollars were reached this year, no one knows exactly what was counted, and the data is not public. There is no official definition of the funds that can be counted towards the 100 billion objective. There is a mix of private and public financing, export credits, etc.
In reality, donors decide for themselves what constitutes climate finance and no international institution uses the same methodology to count them. An announcement made by the United Kingdom in October 2023 perfectly illustrates the absurdity of letting donors decide what can be counted as climate financing, without a common definition or control: London plans to expand its definition of climate finance in order to be able to inflate its figures, without spending a pound more.
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But where are and where are the billions of promised public money really going? To see clearly in this Wild West of climate financing, ONE has developed the “Climate Finance Files”, a new open source database which reveals new and detailed figures on public funding actually granted by States and international institutions to support countries vulnerable to climate change. After months of work to gather hundreds of millions of data on the subject, it turns out that almost two thirds of public funding declared to the OECD has in reality never been disbursed or has not been something to do with the climate. At least $343 billion between 2013 and 2021 is missing.
Two major problems emerge in the accounting of climate finance. Firstly, the OECD considers in its calculation that any project having a link, even minimal, with the climate, can be counted in its entirety under climate financing: under the pretext of installing a solar panel on an airport, it is the total investment in its construction which will be taken into account for the climate! In the absence of common rules and methodologies, the creativity of donors to paint all types of financing green and create illusions about respecting their commitments is almost limitless.
For example, Japan is integrating into its efforts against climate change… the financing of a coal-fired power station! The United States considers that the financing of a hotel can be counted as part of its climate financing. Italy does not hesitate to add the construction of a chocolate factory. Thus, the promotion of the use of natural gas (Japan and the United States) and police equipment (Italy) or the fight against terrorism (European Union and Italy) are also shamelessly integrated into the accounting of financial efforts. against global warming.
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Secondly, unlike other financial flows to poor countries, such as official development assistance, for which only disbursements, i.e. the money actually received by the recipient countries, are counted, with regard to climate financing, the The OECD has chosen to count commitments, i.e. intentions or promises of financing.
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Let’s say that a country plans to finance a wind turbine in a poor country to the tune of 1 million euros, but at the end of the year, due to budget cuts or abandonment of the project, only 10% of the funds have been disbursed, that is 1 million euros which will be counted in the total climate financing of this country. Unsurprisingly, in the vast majority of cases, disbursements are lower than commitments.
Crisis of confidence
This situation has become grotesque. Because, in the end, it hides inaction. Nigeria thus only received 24% of the funding promised to it between 2013 and 2021, Senegal 34% and Kenya 48%. And for a large number of poor countries, debt repayments are often much more important than the climate financing they receive: this was the case for 20 countries among the 46 most heavily indebted between 2019 and 2020. Seven of these countries are in Africa.
And as if that were not enough, 58% of all climate financing allocated to the 54 most heavily indebted countries between 2019 and 2021 is… loans, risking worsening the debt crisis and compromising the capacity of these countries to combat climate change in the long term. The millions of people who are already bearing the brunt of the effects of climate change are the first victims of the opacity surrounding climate finance.
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To meet the challenge of climate change, it is urgent to ensure that all donors use common, transparent and verifiable methodologies for calculating their contributions. Because broken promises, gross exaggerations and questionable irregularities are at the origin of an unprecedented crisis of confidence between poor countries and donor countries, whose promises they no longer believe and which they consider hypocrites.
It is a question of trust for our partners but also for citizens. This is public money, and we all have the right to know how it is spent. If our leaders continue to believe that immense sums are spent to support poor countries, but the results do not follow, citizens’ support for international solidarity also risks eroding little by little. The challenge of the COP28 which is opening is nothing less than to restore confidence in the words given, to finally obtain results, at the risk of weakening the support of all citizens for the efforts necessary for the climate. , at the precise moment when these mutations are more than ever everyone’s business.
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