Rich nations ‘exaggerate’ climate finance: study
Rich countries have over-reported finance to help countries adapt to the impacts of climate change by $20 billion over the last decade, leaving at-risk communities drastically underfunded, a new analysis showed yesterday.
Under the 2015 Paris climate deal, countries are required to boost funding to hard-hit governments, evenly split between cash to mitigate global warming and to help them adapt to future climate impacts.
Developed countries promised to provide $50 billion in annual finance for adaptation by 2020. But official OECD figures show that in 2018 donors committed just $16.8 billion.
The true figure, according to an analysis by green group CARE International, is in fact far lower: just $9.7 billion.
CARE and its partner organisations in Africa and southeast Asia assessed 112 climate adaptation projects funded by 25 donor nations equivalent to 13 percent of total global adaptation finance between 2013-2017.
They found that the funding for adaption in these projects had been over reported by 42 percent. Applying that figure to remaining projects, CARE said that adaptation finance had been over-reported by $20 billion during the same period.
It said several countries and donors had overblown their adaptation grants by including finance for construction projects such as housing and roads not related to the climate at all.
The United Nations last week said countries were falling short of their Paris pledges by failing to fund vulnerable nations' climate fight.
It said the true cost of adaptation -- reducing the fallout among communities and increasing their capacity to deal with climate-related disasters such as floods and drought -- was currently around $70 billion annually. But that figure could swell as high as $300 billion a year by the end of the decade, it said.
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