Guest essay by Eric Worrall

The UNFCCC Bonn Climate Conference, due to end in a few days, has accepted a report which demands an additional $300 billion per year on top of the $100 billion already promised by the world’s governments. The cash is to be disbursed via existing green groups, because it is “so tedious” to set up a new UN bureaucracy to spend your money.

Innovative finance needed to find $300 billion a year for climate losses

By Laurie Goering

LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – With money for action on climate change already in short supply, an estimated $300 billion a year needed to help countries deal with unavoidable climate losses will have to come from innovative new sources, such as a financial transaction tax or carbon tax, researchers say.

Funding for such climate “loss and damage” aims to assist people who lose their land to sea level rise, for instance, or are forced to migrate as drought makes growing crops impossible in some regions.

“What stands out most clearly is that there isn’t currently enough funding to even begin thinking about financing loss and damage, with available climate, development, risk reduction and disaster recovery financing all falling short by an order of magnitude,” said researchers at the Berlin-based Heinrich Böll Foundation.

In a report released at the U.N. climate negotiations in Bonn, now heading into their second week, researchers said about $50 billion a year would be needed by 2020 to help people who lose their land and culture or are forced to migrate as a result of climate-related problems.

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No new body should be created to handle and disperse the funds, however, they said, with money instead put through existing organizations such as the Green Climate Fund or the Global Environment Facility.

Harjeet Singh, who heads climate change policy for charity ActionAid, also said that setting up a new loss and damage funding body made no sense.

“It’s so tedious to set up an institution and get it going, and make sure the money reaches the intended people. It does make sense to use the existing mechanisms to transfer the money,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview from Bonn.

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