New figures due out in early October are expected to show how much funding to help developing states address climate change needs to be drummed up to meet a 2020 pledge of $100 billion a year, dispersing the fog surrounding the numbers.
The estimates, produced by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the Climate Policy Initiative (CPI), will be the first to use a definition agreed by donors, intended to avoid duplication and help clarify the complex picture of international climate finance.
Ensuring wealthy countries are on the road to meeting their 2020 commitment, made at a UN conference in 2009, is seen as crucial to the success of Paris talks in December, expected to produce a new global agreement to curb climate change.
Christiana Figueres, head of the UN climate change secretariat, recently said she expected donor governments to outline plans for reaching the $100 billion goal at a meeting of finance ministers in Lima on October 9.
“Climate finance has been a source of some tension between donors and receiving countries. Donors always think they give and recipients always think they have not received,” Giza Gaspar-Martins, an Angolan government official who leads negotiations for the least developed countries, told journalists in London.
Rich nations are hoping the fresh estimates will help lay those tensions to rest.
On September 6, ministers and government officials from donor countries, including the US, European nations, Australia and Japan, issued a statement outlining their common view on what should be counted towards the $100 billion goal.
According to the statement, it will comprise public money provided by donor governments through a range of institutions and instruments, as well as private money for climate-relevant activities mobilised by public finance and public policy.
The methodology would exclude money raised by developing countries, avoid counting funding more than once, and encourage the most effective use of the finance.
For years, researchers have decried the lack of an international system for tracking climate finance, arguing that ambiguity in the numbers has undermined trust between rich and poor countries in the UN climate negotiations.
The new methodology should go some way towards tackling that problem – though it may still have some flaws.
Donors have already flagged this possibility, admitting that data and methodological limitations prevent them accounting for all flows towards the $100 billion goal, especially those resulting from public policies.
“Any near-term estimate produced will necessarily be partial, and will omit some – and possibly a substantial amount – of climate finance mobilised,” the statement said.
Barbara Buchner, a senior director with the CPI, said there was still much work to be done to collect and analyse data. More accurate estimates would only be available towards the end of 2016, she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“It’s a very complicated issue,” she added.