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By EDITH M. LEDERER. Associated Press
UNITED NATIONS (AP) — U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said Wednesday he thinks rich countries can finally meet their pledge to provide $100 billion annually to help poor nations cope with climate change beginning this year — and will definitely reach that amount in 2023.
It would be more than two years later that the 2020 target, which was set by developed nations at a U.N. summit in Copenhagen in 2009. This funding goal was to help developing countries adapt and mitigate global warming.
Kerry told an informal U.N. Security Council meeting on “Climate Finance for Sustaining Peace and Security” that President Joe Biden is committed to increasing U.S. funding to developing countries to help with climate change.
He stated that Biden had promised to increase U.S. climate finance annually to more than $11 billion in September 2017, quadrupling funding from Barack Obama’s 2009-2017 presidency.
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“And that increase is going to help us to deliver on $100 billion,” Kerry said. “We’re doing just a little bit shy of that for 2022. It is clear that we will have it in 2023. I still think we can get it for 2022.”
Kerry said as part of increased U.S. efforts at last November’s U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Biden announced “an emergency plan for adaptation and resilience.” It “is going to help more than 500 million people in developing countries to be able to manage the impacts of the climate crisis by 2030,” he said.
He stated that the administration is working with Congress to produce $3Billion annually for the program, and to increase adaptation efforts for 2024. “It’s the largest kind of commitment like this that the United States has ever made in our history,” he said.
But Kerry said to totally fund the economic transition that all countries must make to tackle climate change, “it’s going to require not just $100 billion but trillions of dollars.”
“No single government — no group of governments — can meet the $2.5 trillion to $4.6 trillion deficit that we face in order to affect this transition,” he said.
He said that the only way for those trillions to be mobilized is to work with private sector. “The private sector will be critical to our success because there are trillions of dollars to legitimately invest in this transition,” Kerry said.
The United States is the 2nd-largest emitter in greenhouse gases. China is the largest emitter and India is the 3rd. Diplomats from the latter two countries, the world’s two most populous nations, also spoke at the council meeting, criticizing the failure of developed countries to meet their climate pledges, including on the $100 billion annually to developing countries.
China’s deputy U.N. ambassador, Dai Bing, said developed countries have “a moral responsibility” and a mandatory international obligation including under the 2015 Paris climate agreement to provide funding to developing countries because they are primarily responsible for climate change and carbon emissions.
He said studies by think tanks indicate that not only has the total amount of yearly financing from developed nations not reached $100 billion, “but there are also problems of inflating the numbers to including private sector green investments and non-climate change related investments in the calculation of official climate finance.”
Ravindra Raguttahalli, Deputy Indian Ambassador, stated that developed countries have not only failed to provide access to climate finance but also failed to deliver on their promises to mitigate and provide technologies to address climate change.
He cited a U.N. climate report released last week that said the “climate finance for adaptation is insufficient and constrains implementation of adaptation, and that globally tracked climate finance is targeted at mitigation and only a small proportion towards adaptation.”
“Affordable access to climate finance and technologies is critical to move forward on climate action,” Raguttahalli said. “Developed countries must provide climate finance of $1 trillion at the earliest,” and this must be new, additional and climate specific, not just diverted from existing government development aid to climate finance.
Sultan Al Jaber , the United Arab Emirates’ special envoy for climate change and minister of industry and advanced technology, said that “climate finance is one of the most important tools to manage climate risks,” but the $100 billion pledge still hasn’t been met.
Al Jaber, who chaired this meeting as the UAE holds the presidency of the council, stated that many countries, including those that are affected by rising sea levels have stressed that $100 billion is not enough.
And he expressed hope that the U.N. climate summit in Egypt in November and the following meeting in the UAE in 2023 will raise ambitions and achieve “concrete solutions” to limit global warming.
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