India hopes progress on funding issues at climate meet

As many as 197 countries are meeting at Katowice to discuss the implementation of the roadmap of the Paris climate change treaty, starting Sunday.

India hopes forward movement on two vexed issues at the two-week-long UN Climate Conference -- how to get the money to initiate climate actions and how to report those actions to the world.

The 24th meeting of Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is being held at the Polish city between December 2-14.

“Finance is going to be a sticking point at CoP24 both in terms of availability of money and the reporting mechanism,” one of the key members of the Indian negotiation team told DH.

Way back in 2010 at Cancun, the rich nations agreed to put up a green corpus, which would receive a funding of $100 billion by 2020. The commitment was reiterated in the Paris climate pact in 2015. But eight years down the line, there's little money on the table.

The only quantifiable additional funding, argues one of the officials, is $12 billion in the Green Climate Fund, out of which India received just about $108 million in two projects.

“The climate finance should be new, additional and predictive, which is not the case at the moment,” said another Indian negotiator.

Also read: World Bank unveils 2021-25 climate action investment

Currently, some of the OECD nations consider the funding under the poverty alleviation scheme as climate finance though India and other developing countries don't agree with such an accounting practice.

Differences

There's also a difference on opinion on how to report these actions as countries lack uniform reporting infrastructure. A key demand from the developing block is an additional investment for building “uniform reporting capacity” before the rich nations can start measuring the outcome in a standardised format.

The Paris agreement was adopted and opened for ratification at the 21st Conference of the Parties (CoP21) in December 2015. The pact took force in November 2016 when 55 countries producing an estimated 55% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions deposited their instruments of ratification with the UN's Depositary. India ratified it in October 2016.

The agreement prescribes an overarching temperature goal – to keep the increase in global average temperature to well below two degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial era (1850-1900) level and pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Rulebook

To achieve such a goal, every nation needs to follow a large number of emission reduction strategies. At Katowice, the countries are to finalise the rulebook having recommendations on modalities, procedures and guidelines to implement these strategies.

“The current draft of the Paris Rulebook is 307 pages long, but the guidelines described in the briefing note are still subject to removals and additions by negotiators. The final Rulebook is expected to be condensed in comparison,” said a source.

Union Environment Minister Harsh Vardhan leads the Indian delegation at the UN Climate Summit. He is being assisted by a 17-member team of officials drawn from different agencies.