Citola Blog
Politicians' Promises - And What People Want
The ebb and flow of rumour and counter-rumour continues. The famous budget of $30 billion, agreed in principle after the COP 15 Copenhagen climate conference last December, may be partly made up of “funny money”.
No-one can ever said to be truly impartial or financially disinterested (someone, somewhere, always pays the wages), but London’s International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) seems to have fewer axes to grind than most. The IIED has just produced a paper that counsels extreme vigilance when examining the pledged cash from richer countries to help poorer countries develop in a way that will, amongst other things, help in the avoided deforestation (REDD) and the reforestation process so dear to our hearts here at Citola.
The paper, in essence, argues that the pledges could be met by tactics such as that of rich countries turning monies previously advanced as grants into loans. The authors of the report argue that there are no real baselines to the COP 15 budget promises, and say that the ongoing United Nations climate talks on Bonn, preparing for the next big conference in Cancun, are in jeopardy of producing no concrete outcome.
Meanwhile, the new head of climate change at the UN, Christiana Figueres, has conceded that the situation is pressing, and that everyone really is going to have to do better following the explosion of exasperated rage which some say was the only true outcome of the COP 15 talks. She has talked to reporters at the Bonn conference, and has admitted that errors have been made – and that the talks towards the end of the Copenhagen conference between emerging nations and richer, better developed ones (essentially when the provisional agreement for the $30 billion budget was hammered out) were lacking in both in certainty and transparency.
Can Ms Figueres do better? Specifically, can she make the big countries stump up the cash and behave better? Let’s hope so. The protesters outside the Bonn talks consistently berate the United States, China and Canada as the bad boys of a fossil-fuel world. And the pressure from within these countries for a greener climate change policy is growing, as papers such as the recent Yale Project on Climate Change demonstrate.
We continue to watch and wait.
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