Originally posted on Environmental Finance At the Paris COP, it is hardly possible to overstate the importance of climate finance – the provision of funds by developed countries for developing countries to take climate action. This money is critical to show poor nations that rich nations are making good on years of promises to provide such funds – promises which have largely gone unfulfilled. It is also essential for negotiations in Paris to begin in…
Last week, the US and China announced a “common vision” for tackling climate change, an announcement that was intended to generate political momentum in the run-up to the United Nation’s Framework Convention on Climate Change talks in Paris this December. One of the most notable portions of China’s commitment is an agreement “to work towards strictly controlling public investment flowing into projects with high pollution and carbon emissions both domestically and internationally.” This announcement…
Originally posted on Environmental Finance Last week, the UN Climate Summit in Lima, Peru, kicked off amid controversy with news that Japan had counted loans for coal projects in Indonesia as international climate finance. (Climate finance is the money developed countries owe to developing countries for climate mitigation and adaptation.) This news was triply damning. First, Japan claimed that coal was climate-friendly. Second, Japan counted money lent to its own multinational corporations as climate finance. And…