Climate Finance Report presented at COP23
By Climatekos
Climatekos was at COP23 in Bonn, and presented its study at the side event “Climate Finance and Energy Transition in the Mediterranean region". The presentation of the UfM Climate Finance Study was held at 11:30-13:00, in Bonn Zone, meeting room 9, and co-organised by the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) Secretariat and the Observatoire Méditerranéen de l'Energie.
In 2010, developed countries committed to raising USD 100 billion per year until 2020 to support climate change mitigation and the needs of developing countries to adapt to climate change (UNFCCC, 2010). This was confirmed in the 2015 Paris Agreement. Such climate funding has been sourced and disbursed through a wide variety of public, private, bilateral, multilateral and alternative sources. For this reason, the aim of the study was to produce an overview on the amount and type of climate finance delivered to the UfM during 2016, with a view to identify the contribution of the USD 100 billion pledge to the UNFCCC. Subsequently, we provided background research and analysis to describe the context and current state of climate finance in the UfM during the last few years.
The countries included in the assessment were Albania, Algeria, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Mauritania, Montenegro, Morocco, Palestine, Tunisia, and Turkey, as well as (to the extent possible) Libya and Syria.
The study included relevant data gathered from bilateral donors, multilateral donors as well as additional climate funds, programmes and initiatives from public and private donors. Interviews were also conducted to gather more accurate information on their climate finance tracking records and climate finance definitions. The detailed analysis delved into the types of projects, the purpose of the finance, the nature of the beneficiary and types of financial instruments used in various countries by different funds. The results were cross-referenced with data from the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC) database and the Joint Report on Multilateral Development Banks’ Climate Finance.
Despite the several challenges encountered in the data collection process, we found that USD 4.6 billion of climate finance was channelled to the UfM region in 2016. Data and overall estimates were verified through various tracking exercises, which confirmed that the regional flows were in the correct order of magnitude. The study shows that the majority of finance was channeled through Turkey, Egypt and Morocco for large transport and energy projects, which were often disbursed as loans. Mitigation projects were also overrepresented in the region. The greatest challenges in tracking climate finance in the region were found to be reporting transparency and the difficulty in separating development aid from climate finance. Such issues are not new and must be brought to the fore at events like the COP23 if we are to push towards a decarbonised world.
For the full version of the report please access here.
