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Postface: fragmentation, failing trust and enduring tensions over what counts as climate finance

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J. Timmons Roberts at Brown University
J. Timmons Roberts
Romain Weikmans at Université Libre de Bruxelles
Romain Weikmans
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Abstract

The Paris Agreement commits nations in Article 2(1) to “Making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development.” However there is an absence of internationally agreed accounting rules that would permit overall assessments of progress to this goal and any meaningful comparisons of performance between countries. This is true also for the quantitative Copenhagen/Cancún promise by developed nations to jointly mobilize US$100 billion by 2020. Our goal is to provoke discussion about the depth of the problems this lack of a functional definition and accounting system have created and perpetuated. We do so by describing the fragmented system of national reporting of climate finance and how the OECD’s Rio Marker system is serving neither contributors nor recipients. More than a trust issue between developed and developing countries, we argue that the lack of modalities to account for climate finance also considerably impedes the effective functioning of the bottom-up approach that now prevails under the UNFCCC. The deadline to propose "modalities of accounting climate finance" by 2018 is a crucial window in which to address this chronic issue in international climate policy.
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Postface: fragmentation, failing trust and enduring
tensions over what counts as climate finance
J. Timmons Roberts
1
•Romain Weikmans
2
Accepted: 13 December 2016 / Published online: 5 January 2017
Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017
Abstract The Paris Agreement commits nations in Article 2(1) to ‘‘Making finance flows
consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient
development.’’ However there is an absence of internationally agreed accounting rules that
would permit overall assessments of progress to this goal and any meaningful comparisons
of performance between countries. This is true also for the quantitative Copenhagen/
Cancu
´n promise by developed nations to jointly mobilize US$100 billion by 2020. Our
goal is to provoke discussion about the depth of the problems this lack of a functional
definition and accounting system have created and perpetuated. We do so by describing the
fragmented system of national reporting of climate finance and how the OECD’s Rio
Marker system is serving neither contributors nor recipients. More than a trust issue
between developed and developing countries, we argue that the lack of modalities to
account for climate finance also considerably impedes the effective functioning of the
bottom-up approach that now prevails under the UNFCCC. The deadline to propose
‘‘modalities of accounting climate finance’’ by 2018 is a crucial window in which to
address this chronic issue in international climate policy.
Keywords Climate finance UNFCCC Paris Agreement OECD Rio Marker Tracking
Abbreviations
DAC Development Assistance Committee
GCF Green Climate Fund
OECD Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development
UNFCCC United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
&J. Timmons Roberts
j_timmons_roberts@brown.edu
1
Climate and Development Lab, Institute for Environment and Society, Brown University,
Box 1951, Providence, RI 02912-1951, USA
2
Centre for Studies on Sustainable Development, Institute for Environmental Management and Land
Use Planning, Universite
´Libre de Bruxelles/Free University of Brussels, Av. F.D. Roosevelt 50
CP130/03, 1050 Ixelles, Belgium
123
Int Environ Agreements (2017) 17:129–137
DOI 10.1007/s10784-016-9347-4
Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. Rights reserved.
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Ciplet, David, Timmons Roberts and Mizan Khan. 2015 Power in a Warming World: The New Global Politics of Climate Change and the Remaking of Environmental Inequality. The MIT Press.
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