International Climate Finance & Policy

The COP 20’s “Lima call for climate action” is no wake-up call but a worrisome sign of a feeble multilateral climate process plagued by political deafness and leaving poor and vulnerable communities alone with the impacts of climate change.

About an hour’s drive outside of Sevilla, Spain’s old city, past grazing black-footed pigs and olive orchards, sits the Abengoa Solucar complex, and it’s truly a sight: Imagine cresting a hill and then all of the sudden seeing several large towers, over 500 feet high, with hundreds of beams of light striking them — solar rays from an army of mirrors arrayed in a circle on the ground below. They’re called heliostats.

Natural resources should be a major contributor to development in some of the countries that need it most. And yet, in some of world’s poorest and most fragile states, they bring just the opposite.

Lili Fuhr and Niclas Hällström sharply criticize climate-change goals that are based on risky or underdeveloped technologies.

Germany's short-term 2020 climate targets are in jeopardy. This is a serious drawback: if the Energiewende should prove ineffective on the climate front, it will fall short on its declared objective and discourage other countries from following suit. The German government is now taking first steps to fight the country's coal power.

The Conference of Parties (COP) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change is meeting in Lima, Peru until December 12, 2014.  In this interview, Barbara Unmüßig, Co-President of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung, speaks about the prospects of the Lima summit, the future of the multilateral climate process and the perspectives for the Green Climate Fund.

In the climate finance arena, the Adaptation Fund (AF) has pioneered direct access. To date, six national implementing entities (NIEs) in Africa have commenced the challenging process of programming direct access funding domestically. This collaborative research report provides lessons learnt on how to strengthen the accreditation of future NIEs to the AF and to jump-start their engagement with the Green Climate Fund (GCF).

Updated just before COP 20 in Lima (Peru), this series of 11 short introductory briefings, written in co-operation with the Overseas Development Institute, discusses a normative framework for and gender aspects of climate financing, the evolving global climate finance architecture, the progress in operationalizing the Green Climate Fund, and looks at the scale and impact of thematic climate finance flows on different regions in the developing world.

This fall the Heinrich Böll Foundation hosted a delegation of civil society representatives and journalists from Poland for a study tour to Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania and New York State to gain a better understanding of the effects that natural gas exploration have had on local communities along the Marcellus Shale. Tomasz Ulanowski, a reporter for the Polish daily newspaper Wyborcza, wrote this report.

The first ever pledging conference for the new Green Climate Fund will be held in Berlin, Germany on November 20th.  Anything less than USD 10 billion in confirmed pledges could be seen as a sign that rich countries are not supportive of the Fund and spell trouble for the climate talks in Lima, Peru beginning in just two weeks.  But at stakes is much more than just one big figure, according to Liane Schalatek.