Climate Policy & Finance

The history of climate policy is also one of the massive sway of the energy industry lobby. More recently, however, that lobby is having to surrender its forts- is dirty business losing its sway on politics? 

Globally, political leaders are lauding the acceptance of the global and legally binding Paris Agreement on Climate Change at COP 21 as a historical moment. It achieves a goal long believed unattainable. However, judged against the enormity of the challenge and the needs and pressure from people on the ground demanding a global deal anchored in climate justice (“system change, not climate change!”), the Paris Agreement can only be called a collective failure and disappointment. Read a critical assessment by hbs colleagues from around the world.  

These graphics highlight the ten most noteworthy insights from joint effort by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung North America and the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) over the past year from monitoring climate finance on Climate Funds Update (CFU).

Just weeks before the Paris climate summit, first funding decisions by the GCF Board at its 11th meeting in Livingstone, Zambia, make the Fund fully operational. Nevertheless, a lot of policy work on outstanding issues is still needed for 2016 before the GCF can stand both the test of time and the test of its own ambition and vision.

Climate change requires urgent action, as hardly any government will deny. Business is also beginning to rise to the challenge. Nevertheless, the voluntary commitments being developed for the climate summit in Paris (COP21) are falling short.

 Since taking office in February 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has focused on turning this northern country on the edge of the Arctic––which possesses the third largest oil reserves in the world after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela––into an energy superpower. The strategy behind this––burn, baby, burn––is the proposed doubling of the extraction of oil from Canada’s bituminous tar sands, located primarily in the western province of Alberta, from the current 2.1 million to 5 million barrels of oil per day.

Civil society observers represented at the 10th Board meeting of the Green Climate Fund Songdo, South Korea, are deeply disappointed about the decision of the GCF Board to accredit as package 13 new implementing entities for projects and programs of the Fund, including Deutsche Bank, one of the world's largest coal financiers.

At its upcoming 10th meeting from July 6-9 in Songdo, the GCF Board – despite the looming pressure of the Paris political deadline – must take care to deliver good decisions, not hasty ones as it feverishly works to get policies and procedures into shape for the first approval of project proposals in the fall. This does neither allow for thorough discussion, nor for dissent among their midst. An analysis by Liane Schalatek.

The year 2015 could go down in history books as the landmark year for turning around the world’s “business-as-usual” economic and financial system in ways that could lead to a sustainable future.  Or, it could be a year of cascading multilateral failures, signaling a further decline of UN-led efforts for sustainable development. When world leaders meet from July 13-16, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for the third UN Conference on Financing for Development (FfD-3), the stakes are high. Fear and hope should motivate the outcomes of the conference. 

Making mitigation finance more gender-responsive, requires addressing inherent biases toward large scale projects and a primary focus on the cost-effectiveness of emissions reductions over the realization of multiple, including non-carbon benefits in mitigation projects and programs, argues Liane Schalatek in a Bonn SBI 42 in-session workshop.