Copenhagen's climate finance - six key questions

Unanswered questions threaten to breed mistrust in the promises of climate-change funding that governments made in the Copenhagen Accord at December's UN summit, says a paper published today by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).

In the Copenhagen Accord developed countries pledged US$30 billion over the three years from 2010 to 2013 and US$100 billion a year from 2020, for developing countries to tackle climate change.

"However, it is far from clear where the funding will come from, if it is genuinely new and additional, and how it will be allocated and channelled?," says co-author Saleemul Huq, a senior fellow in IIED's climate change group. "The paper raises six key questions that will need to be answered."

Huq's co-authors are J. Timmons Roberts, who is Director of Environmental Studies at Brown University in the United States, and Martin Stadelmann, a researcher at the Center for International and Comparative Studies, ETH and University of Zurich, Switzerland.

"Critics are claiming that much of the promise made at Copenhagen will be met with 'recycled aid,' says Roberts.

"Too many treaties have faltered as promises go unmet, and we cannot afford this to happen with climate change," he adds. "To meet these critics there needs to be much broader discussion of what should count as climate finance, and how it will be monitored and tracked."

Download the briefing paper "Copenhagen's climate finance - six key questions"