A long, long time ago (2009) in a galaxy far, far away (COP15 in Copenhagen), developed countries committed to a collective goal of raising $100 billion per year by 2020 for climate action in developing countries. The goal was formalized the following year at COP16 in Cancun. At COP21 in Paris (2015), all parties saw the writing on the wall – the prognosis wasn’t good, so the target date was extended to 2025. When 2020 ended, it was no surprise that target dollar amount wasn’t achieved by the original date.
Last month, OECD announced that the funding goal was met in 2022 – “This achievement occurs two years later than the original 2020 target year, but one year earlier than in projections produced by the OECD prior to COP26.” The full report is available here, which includes information on the time lag in availability of official climate finance data that was one reason for OECD publishing the report two years after the goal was achieved (although OECD issued a preliminary indication last November that the goal has likely been met).
The funding came from a combination of private and public sources, but OECD only tracks four sources:
- Bilateral public climate finance provided by developed countries’ institutions, notably bilateral aid agencies and development banks,
- Multilateral public climate finance provided by multilateral development banks and multilateral climate funds, attributed to developed countries,
- Climate-related officially supported export credits, provided by developed countries’ official export credit agencies, and
- Private finance mobilised by bilateral and multilateral public climate finance, attributed to developed countries.
Most of the funding is geared toward mitigation rather than adaptation, and multilateral loans are the primary mechanism. While it is good that we will see an uptick in mitigation projects in developing countries, it would be prudent to be mindful of heightened political and fraud risk in those countries as well. Those risks impact project developers and anyone relying on project success as part of their climate risk management program.
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Photo credit: Achim Wagner – stock.adobe.com
