Foreign Minister Julie Bishop defends using foreign aid money to fund climate change fund

Updated

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has defended using money from the foreign aid budget to contribute to an international climate change fund.

More than 20 countries have pledged around $US10 billion to the United Nations Green Climate Fund.

Yesterday at the UN climate change conference in Peru's capital Lima, Ms Bishop announced that Australia would contribute $200 million from foreign aid spending.

However, while in Opposition Ms Bishop told the ABC the Coalition "would certainly not spend our foreign aid budget on climate change programs".

This minister said the situation was different.

"What we were talking about then was when Labor would dump millions of dollars into a multilateral fund and have no control over where it went, in which regions it was spent," she told AM.

"What we're doing is targeting this funding into our region, where our aid program is operating."

Analysis: ABC environment and science reporter Jake Sturmer The divide between developed and developing nations is proving tricky to bridge for negotiators in Peru.



NGOs are saying that things are taking far too long and the pace of action is inadequate.



Developing nations want the agreement to set out how richer countries will meet their $100 billion promise and there's debate over what's expected from countries in their pre-Paris commitments (known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs).



Negotiators are now looking to firm up what will be in those INDCs – and whether they will have to include any further financial commitments to poorer nations.



There's likely to be some form of agreement from the summit – but whether it will actually help progress things for Paris isn't clear.



If the agreement is vague it will make the job all that much harder for governments to come to a legally binding agreement by Paris next year.

She said Australian aid had already been "utilising funding to help countries build their infrastructure, their energy efficiency, forestry initiatives and emissions reduction".

The money will be budgeted over four years from Australia's aid program, which has already been cut by billions of dollars.

Ms Bishop said a major focus for Australia at the Lima talks was to argue the distinction between "developed" and "developing" countries should be dismissed.

"We believe that this old divide between developed and developing countries does not reflect economic reality," she said.

"To say that China is a developing country when it in fact has the largest economy in the world and dwarfs many other developed countries shows that binary differentiation is not appropriate in this day and age."

Greens leader Christine Milne, who is also in Lima, agreed the conference needed to find a way beyond "that impasse" but said that emissions from developed countries in decades past was already having an effect on poorer nations.

"A lot of countries say that there's a historical responsibility to pay for compensation, effectively, to countries that are already suffering because of global warming and of course they're our Pacific neighbours," she said.

Senator Milne said it was in Australia's best interests to act anyway.

"This summer we will see heatwaves in Australia, we will see more extreme bushfire days," she said.

"We are already experiencing global warming, as everyone else is, so it's in our best interests to take this on and take a leadership role rather than being a laggard."

The latest Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) Greenhouse Gas Emissions Index ranks Australia as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases per capita.

The Federal Government said it was committed to reducing emissions by five per cent below 2000 levels by 2020 through its Direct Action policy.

It intended to reveal Australia's targets for reducing emissions beyond 2020 by mid next year, ahead of the December 2015 UN conference in Paris.

Topics: federal-government, world-politics, climate-change, bishop-julie, peru, australia

First posted