Nirmala Sitharaman raises climate financing issue in United States

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Friday raised outstanding issues related to climate funding, specially the failure by developed countries to make good on their decade-long commitment to put $100 billion in developing countries to help them transition to clean technology and energy.

Addressing a news conference at the conclusion of her US visit that started on the east coast with visits to Harvard and meetings with private sector leaders, Sitharaman said climate funding was an issue also brought up lingering issues about the transfer of technology, a key climate issue for developing countries.

Both these issues are being seen as potentially key impediments to a successful UN climate change conference in Glasgow — known as COP26 — next month.

There are no measures to determine if “money spent on a particular project by somebody will be part of that 100 billion”, the minister said, adding there is no way to know if $100 billion has been raised. “How do we measure that it is indeed coming or not, is also one of the issues,” she added.

The minister did not say it but the annual target of $100 billion has not been met yet. The developed countries had committed to raise that money by 2020 and then by 2025.

In 2009 at COP 15 in Copenhagen, developed countries decided to commit to a goal of mobilizing jointly $100 billion dollars a year by 2020 to address the needs of developing countries. Member countries decided then that this funding would come from a wide variety of sources, public and private, bilateral and multilateral, including alternative sources of finance, and that new multilateral funding for adaptation would be delivered through effective and efficient fund arrangements, with a governance structure providing for equal representation of developed and developing countries, according to a background note.