Friday, August 10, 2012

CFR: Guest Post: Ready for Primetime? The $100 Billion Climate Fund

Click here to read full article on Council of Foreign Relations

by Guest Blogger for Stewart M. Patrick
August 9, 2012
Curtis Wold, of the Kansas Wetlands Education Center, examines one of the dry pools at the Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area, in Great Bend, Kansas August 7, 2012 (Jeff Tuttle/Courtesy Reuters). Curtis Wold, of the Kansas Wetlands Education Center, examines one of the dry pools at the Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Area, in Great Bend, Kansas August 7, 2012 (Jeff Tuttle/Courtesy Reuters).

Below, my colleague Farah Thaler, associate director of CFR’s International Institutions and Global Governance program assesses the progress of and prospects for the Green Climate Fund.

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.

Click here to read full article on Council of Foreign Relations

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