After delays and political
bickering, a late August date was announced last week to hold the first meeting
of the Green Climate Fund (GCF)—the ambitious multilateral funding instrument
to help developing countries tackle climate change. We should expect more snags
in the coming years as the GCF is pieced together before it is fully
operational.
The GCF, proposed at the
2009 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting in Copenhagen,
is envisioned to amass up to $100 billion a year after 2020 of additional and
sustainable funds. Through grants and
concessional loans for climate projects, the fund is expected to finance
mitigation and adaptation efforts in poor countries at an unprecedented scale.
To put it in perspective, the largest climate fund today—the Climate Investment
Funds under the umbrella of the World Bank—has $6.5 billion pledged for the
period 2009-2012. The World Bank in total funds some $43 billion in development
projects per year. The GCF could double
that.
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