Some developing countries risk destabilising the UN climate negotiations in Paris by trying to rerun old battles over climate aid that have already been resolved, the head of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation has said.
Angel Gurria, the OECD’s secretary general robustly defended the organisation’s assessment of global climate finance and said that developing countries should accept that most funding due to them under international agreements was already flowing.
Climate finance – to help poor countries cut emissions and cope with the effects of extreme weather – is a key sticking point at the Paris climate change talks. Poor countries were promised in 2009 that at least $100bn (£66bn) would flow to them by 2020, and proof that this will be fulfilled is a pre-requisite for them to sign any agreement.
But in a veiled swipe at the Indian delegation Gurria said it was never the intention of previous agreements that the finance would come exclusively from public funding. Previous agreements had always allowed the funds to come from a variety of sources, including the private sector.
“You can make speeches about this, but it’s not serious and it’s not professional,” Gurria said. “You can’t make these statements [criticising the inclusion of private investment] without a very big risk [to the UN process] at this stage.”
The OECD’s analysis found that financial flows for climate assistance were already strong, at about $62bn a year, and set to increase.
“This is progress,” he told the Guardian in an interview. “We are not in a bad place. Does this mean we might overshoot the target [for providing assistance]? Hopefully.”
The organisation was asked by the French hosts of the Paris climate conference to assess how much financial help was becoming available, but its findings have been disputed by some developing countries, which say the accounting methods used are unclear, and called for more money to come from public sector sources instead of businesses.
Countries including India and Brazil have strongly criticised the OECD analysis, arguing that the accounting methods were “murky”.
Gurria mounted a tough defence of the methods used by the OECD. The organisation’s analysts had examined all the sources of finance, including overseas development assistance from rich to poor governments, loans from development banks, and export credits, and taken care to avoid double counting of any that could be overlapping. He pointed to the nearly 60 pages of the report devoted to an explanation of the methodology.
“This is severe, this is rigorous, this is transparent,” he said. “No one can say that our method was wrong.”
He suggested that some developing countries were seeking to reopen old disagreements. Commitments made at the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009, where the promise of $100bn a year was first made, and annual UN climate meetings since then, have specifically included private sector finance, as well as funding from development banks such as the World Bank, governments, and other institutions.
But since then some NGOs and some developing country governments have argued that $100bn should be supplied only from the public sector of the industrialised world. In a letter, quoted by the Indian government in a recently published discussion paper on climate finance, 120 civil society groups said: “Private finance should should not be substituted for public funding or counted towards the $100bn.”
This was never the intention of the Copenhagen pledge, or subsequent reaffirmations of it, Gurria said.
He also pointed out that the government of Peru, which hosted last year’s climate talks in Lima and is a leading developing country voice at the Paris talks, had co-signed the OECD report, a reflection of their confidence in it.
If private sector money cannot be included, Gurria said, then developed countries would be called upon to pay $100bn a year from their taxpayers towards climate goals in the poor world. “Taxpayers would have to put their hands in their pockets, year after year,” he said.
Just because a private sector company might make a profit, that did not negate the value of its investment in a developing country, he said.
Gurria also rejected the idea that donor countries could hide behind general commitments to overseas aid, in order to inflate their climate finance figures. “We sniff very closely to see if it is real or not,” he said. “We don’t want substitutions from [existing] overseas aid. We have evidence and we know.”
Gurria said that the OECD’s report had been instrumental in encouraging donor countries to have a “can-do” attitude and up their contributions, pointing to the US’s doubling of its commitments to poor countries to adapt to the effects of climate change.
Gurria also said that the conference should abandon the idea that no parts of the deal can be resolved until the final moments. “Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed” is a mantra that has been cited by participants. The phrase comes from the Doha round of international trade talks, but according to Gurria it is “not conducive or constructive” at the current negotiations.
He called for countries to resolve some of the outstanding issues – such as on the level of emissions cuts needed – separately, in order to make progress in time for the deadline.
