France pushes for resolution on climate deal funds

 France will go all out to resolve contentious issues on the “fund flow from rich nations” to the developing world before the UN climate change summit in Paris in December.

French environment and energy minister Segolene Royal said this here after meeting Indian leaders, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

“The financial issues have to be resolved first. Otherwise, there will be an air of suspicion that developed countries only talk and nothing more,” said Royal, who would have to play a key role if the Paris conference has to reach a consensus on emission reduction.

Only a solution to the vexed finance issue could give credibility to the Paris agreement and make it possible, she said.

As a part of the long-winding international negotiations on climate change, a global climate fund has been created within the framework of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Though the fund seeks to have a corpus of $100 billion by 2020 from voluntary contributions from private and public sectors, the rich countries have so far only pledged $10 billion to the Green Climate Fund (GCF), which actually has few millions of dollars in its coffers.

Even before operationalisation of the fund, some of the developed nations sought to impose conditions on India on how to spend the GCF money.

Significantly, New Delhi has recently won the support of Berlin with German environment minister Barbara Hendricks agreeing to the Indian proposal on how international assistance on emission reduction measures should be spent.

“We first opposed it (the Indian proposal), but now we are convinced. Since India’s per capita emission was very low, it is difficult to impose the mitigation measures,” she said last week after meeting her Indian counterpart Prakash Javadekar.

Once the pool is ready, the money would be given to the developing nations and emerging economies. New Delhi proposed spending 50 per cent of the money on the long term measures to adapt to the vagaries of climate change and the rest on the direct steps to curb emissions.

Javadekar met political leaders from a dozen countries to push for yet another Indian demand of using the GCF money to pay the intellectual property rights (IPR) charges for clean technologies. “Companies that carried out the research would be compensated,” he said.

“The Indian proposal is not only feasible but an indispensable one. Since rich countries depleted natural resources, its moral obligation for them to pay for the developing nations,” said the French minister.