CARIBBEAN-UNFCC officials warn of “gargantuan level” of finance needed to deal with climate change

ST. GEORGE’S, Grenada, CMC – The Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) Secretariat, Simon Stiell, Thursday said a “gargantuan level of finance” would be required to implement the Paris Agreement.

On December 12, 2015, at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 21), parties to the UNFCCC reached a landmark agreement to combat climate change and to accelerate and intensify the actions and investments needed for a sustainable, low-carbon future.

The Paris Agreement builds upon the Convention and – for the first time – brings all nations into a common cause to undertake ambitious efforts to combat climate change and adapt to its effects, with enhanced support to assist developing countries to do so. As such, it charts a new course in the global climate effort.

Developed countries, first in 2009 and again in 2015 under the Paris Climate Agreement, agreed to a collective goal of US$100 billion annually in grants, loans, private sector investments, and more by 2020.

However, nations have yet to meet their promise more than a decade after the first pledge was made.

Stiell told the opening of the two-day second Caribbean Small Island Developing States (SIDS) High-Level Dialogue on Climate Change that while there has been “a lot of talk about the 100 billion dollars that’s supposed to be delivered this year per year for developing countries, the amount that is required is….six trillion dollars” to reduce global emissions by 2030.

The former Grenada government minister responsible for Climate Resilience and The Environment told the audience, “What the global community will need to find and that’s just to implement our nationally determined contributions (NDC).

“This is not just limited to the financial trust issues we have within our process over areas such as the 100 billion dollars or the doubling of adaptation finance, but without urgent action to reset the global financial framework, we are not going to reach the climate goals that are set for us.”

He warned, “The finance we seek will come from something other than traditional sources. Those coffers, those public monies from developed countries, are now channeled to other priorities.

“We seem to go globally from one crisis to another, but globally, we only seem to have an appetite to deal with one crisis at a time, whether it is a pandemic, a war, or climate change.”

He said climate change is competing with those other “local priorities,” and even as he continues to “hammer home” the point that the non-delivery of promises “is breaking the faith,” he will continue to raise them at every forum.

He told the audience that the region could not go into COP 28 to be held in Dubai from November 30 to December 12 this year “with a transactional mindset, which again is why meeting to determine what the Caribbean priorities are for the COP and the approach that you seek to take is going to be so important, but it cannot be transactional.”

He praised regional leaders and other stakeholders for putting “their shoulders behind the wheel and looking at innovative ways to source alternative sources of finance and looking and making contributions at a global level as to what is required to complete the international financial architecture firm for the purpose.

The meeting here will focus on six thematic areas, including financing the transition to renewable energy in the Caribbean, tapping into the potential of wind, solar, geothermal, and hydroelectricity, as well as transforming international financial architecture, enabling access to blue and green finance, and regional collaboration on carbon pricing mechanisms.

Accelerating e-mobility: lowering costs, reducing emissions, and building a reliable transportation system through electrification is also among the themes to be discussed here, as well as creating more muscular national systems for climate transparency: accessing data and information to track progress, increasing international accountability, and attract support.

Stiell, based in Bonn in Germany, said the themes “reflect the realities the region faces,” each developing a joint position to take to Dubai.

He said the discussions over the next two days should not only be about climate, adding, “It is about environment and development nexus.

“You cannot separate the two. These are two sides of the same coin. Climate impacts every single element of national, regional, and global development. They cannot be separated, and bringing these elements together, which you seek to do…is precisely the direction you need to be going in.

“Together, the Caribbean has a strong voice with great moral weight. United, we are a bloc that cannot be ignored, one which can and frequently does shape positions for much wider groups, countries (and) setting the bar for others to achieve,” Stiell told the audience.

“Unity is where your strength lies,” he said, reminding the conference here that COP 28 will not be “an easy” one.

“The geopolitics that surrounds the climate agenda, which is east versus west, global north versus global south, has never been as fractured and as inflammatory as we have now going into this COP,” Stiell said, adding,” It has never been this tricky…but we have to find a path forward”.