SUMMARY
In 2009 rich countries committed to support climate change adaptation and mitigation activities in developing countries. It was agreed that they would provide “scaled-up, new and additional” finance, reaching $100bn a year in 2020. Rich countries have recently acknowledged that this target has not been met. What is also important is that a lot of the funds reported as climate finance cannot be considered as “new and additional” to support for development.
Using two definitions of additionality presented by the UNFCCC Biennial Assessments, CARE finds that a large share of funding from rich countries is simply Official Development Assistance (ODA) being rebadged as climate finance. This finance does not represent increased effort on the part of rich countries to pay for the costs of climate change.
In 2018 the OECD reported that rich countries had provided and mobilised a total of $78.9 billion of climate finance, well short of the $100 billion pledged in 2009. Of this total, over $60 billion is “public climate finance”, or finance which is directly attributable to public budgets in the global North. This briefing paper assesses the $30 billion of that public climate finance, which is also classified as ODA, to determine how much can be considered new and additional.
We find that only 6% of climate finance can be considered as additional to the pledge made by developed countries to provide 0.7% of their Gross National Income (GNI) as ODA annually. And only 46% of the climate finance contributed in 2018 is found to be additional to the amount of ODA disbursed by rich countries in 2009 (when the $100 billion target was agreed).
Development and climate activities require substantially increased funding. Climate change adds additional costs to development agendas in the global South, the financial contributions of rich countries towards climate change must be additional to their support for development. Failure to provide new and additional climate finance directly threatens the amount and efficacy of finance to be spent on poverty reduction, education, health, and women’s rights
