Climate financing increases by 17 per cent, says report

A United Nations report on climate financing has indicated that since the signing of the PARIS Agreement in 2015, funding support increased by 17per cent in recent years. Aside, some still-developing nations have received more leeway to try and craft an economy that is less reliant on fossil fuels.

The UN figures suggest that the value of climate finance worldwide was at $584bn in 2014 but increased steadily to $681bn at the end of 2016.It further reveals that renewable energy supported by private finance and energy efficiency measures were the major drivers of this funding at $295bn and $246bn respectively.

Accordingly, there was also a 30per cent increase to $55.7bn in the amount of money coming from public funding sources such as governments, which in turn has elicited an additional $20bn of private investment.

Mr. Joe Thwaites, who contributed to climate finance work for the World Resources Institute, said: “If this rate of increase continues, then developed countries are on track to mitigate effects of climate change on the people”

At the 21st Conference of the Parties in Paris in 2015, Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), reached a landmark agreement to combat climate change, 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.
The Paris Agreement’s central aim is to strengthen the global response to the threat of climate change by keeping the global temperature rise this century well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

The UN Secretary-General António Guterres will convene a Climate Summit by September 2019, to bring world leaders of governments, the private sector and civil society together to support the multilateral process and to increase climate action and ambition. Similarly, a report on green gas emission released by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the 24th Conference of Parties in Katowice, Poland has indicated a 23per cent drop in GHG per person in developed countries between 1990 and 2016.

The report, titled ‘Compilation and Synthesis”, attributed the development to impact of actions to mitigate climate change as well as the effects of economic and demographic growth, which helped to bring down emissions in these countries by 4.4 per cent between 2010 and 2016.