Expert view
5 December 2012
Postcard from Doha: Show me the money
Photo: A woman from the Chilimo forest in Ethiopia plants a new tree.
By Michelle Winthrop
It seems to be an annual ritual here, that towards the end of week two of negotiations the focus turns to cold hard cash.
Everyone is agreed that money is needed. It’s needed to get REDD+ systems off the ground. It’s needed to re-orient energy systems and put in place the building blocks for that elusive green economy. And of course cash is urgently needed to help the most vulnerable countries and people adapt to its worst effects.
Where the money comes from
So far so good. The tricky bit is to agree on where the money comes from (government budgets or private investors), what the balance of priority is between the requirements, and other minor matters like how much, when, and who digs deepest.
As you’d expect, there’s lots of ideology swirling around. Some developing countries accuse developed countries of pushing private investment to win contracts for northern firms. Some developed countries have reiterated that there’s a big old recession on, and we’re trying our best.
Adaptation to climate change
But some cold, hard facts remain. The much-vaunted Green Climate Fund, which everybody agreed last year was a jolly good idea, remains completely empty. A lot of so-called Fast Start Finance has been spent, and further commitments are thin on the ground. And the bill for global adaptation to climate change remains the same: $100 billion per year between now and 2020.
But strongly held political positions aside, there is hope. One investor spoke yesterday about how they had managed to raise a combination of public and private money for a major wind power project in Ethiopia, which will eventually be the biggest on-shore source of renewable energy in Africa.
I was surprised to see in an OECD presentation that Kenya is one of the biggest recipients of support for low carbon development.
UK funding for climate change
And last night at a meeting in the British Embassy, Greg Barker, the Energy and Climate Change minister, announced some new cash from the UK, including for Uganda.
After the Embassy do, I had a drink with some journalists from the UK. As you would expect, they gave me a helpful wake-up call, about how hard it is to report on a bunch of negotiations that are not going well, on an issue most of the UK public is quite apathetic about. In our little Doha bubble, we think we’re saving the world, but most ordinary people are doing their Christmas shopping in the UK, or trying to survive in Africa.
–      Michelle is our country director in Ethiopia. She’s been writing postcards from the UN climate change conference in Doha, Qatar. Read them here:
