The delivery plan sets out an estimated trajectory of climate finance from 2021 through to 2025 – taking into account new climate finance pledges from individual developed countries and multilateral development banks. The three politicians said that in talks several governments had made additional pledges, but these would only be announced at COP26 and were not yet included in the plan. The plan to meet the target by 2023 does not rely on a significant improvement of private climate finance, said a press release.
NGOs were quick to criticise the plan. It “falls short of committing to meet 600 billion dollars over 6 years, or offering a serious scaled-up adaptation finance target for 2025,” said Iskander Erzini Vernoit, policy advisor on climate finance at think tank E3G.
Jan Kowalzig, international development organisation Oxfam’s senior climate change policy advisor, said: “Unfortunately, the plan does not contain enough information to really verify the claim made in it.”
“Instead, it relies on the self-reporting of donor countries which allows them to grossly over-estimate the value of the support they provide.” Kowalzig also criticised that the plan “conveniently fails to mention” the funds that poorer countries are owed for every year wealthy nations fall short. “This shortfall, which started to accumulate in 2020, will likely amount to several tens of billions of dollars.”
In any case, “100 billion US dollars is not enough,” Kowalzig told Clean Energy Wire. “It is a political figure pulled out in 2009 and it is outdated for two main reasons already. The goal was set in the context of the 2°C benchmark at the time. Now the benchmark is 1.5°C under the Paris Agreement,” he said. Countries thus need more support, and countries should debate what happens after 2025 at COP26 in Glasgow.
