Finance key to forging global pact on climate change, says Hollande
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FORGING a global climate pact hinges on rich nations making firm finance commitments, French President Francois Hollande said yesterday, warning of “risks of failure” for a year-end Paris conference.
“There will be no agreement ... if there is no firm commitment on finance” for developing nations, he said as ministers and diplomats from about 60 countries met in the French capital to discuss the issue.
The November 30-December 11 UN conference aims at sealing a universal climate deal, but without an accord on finance “countries will refuse, emerging economies... and they are right,” the president told journalists.
Finance is a major stumbling block in the fraught, years-long UN effort to conclude a pact committing all the world’s nations to climate-altering greenhouse gas emission curbs.
The overarching goal is to limit average global warming to 2 degrees Celsius over pre-Industrial Revolution levels — the threshold at which scientists say can still avoid worst-case-scenario climate effects.
Hollande addressed a press conference as foreign and environment ministers concluded two days of talks on finance — money to help developing countries make the shift to greener energy, adapt to a climate-altered world, and deal with the losses and damages they will inevitably suffer from such impacts as rising sea levels, droughts and storms.
Poor and developing nations, among the most threatened by global warming, are insisting their rich counterparts show how they intend to meet a promise made in 2009 of US$100 billion in climate finance annually from 2020.
On Friday, a five-day round of official text-drafting negotiations closed in Bonn with diplomats expressing frustration at their lack of progress.
They will meet in the former West German capital from October 19 to 23 to work on the unwieldy blueprint — currently an 83-page list of options for dealing with the problem.
“Everything will turn on the question of finance,” Hollande said, and warned that the way things stand: “There are risks of failure.”
Janos Pasztor, assistant UN secretary general on climate, agreed at a conference elsewhere in Paris that: “Financing is absolutely key. US$100 billion is not that much when we want to change the whole world into a no-carbon future,” he said. “For that we need trillions.”
A meeting of the UN General Assembly later this month, said Hollande, would be a “major” step on the road to Paris, as would a joint International Monetary Fund-World Bank meeting in Lima in October.
And he announced he would travel to China in November, to “launch an appeal for the success of the climate conference” with President Xi Jinping.
“If we don’t conclude an agreement ... it’s not hundreds of thousands of refugees that we’ll have to deal with in the next 20 or 30 years, it’s millions,” Hollande said as Europe struggles with an influx of refugees, mainly from Syria.
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