By Joydeep Gupta, IANS
Bali : A special international fund to help developing countries adapt to climate change is expected to be announced at the UN climate change conference here Tuesday, the Global Environment Facility (GEF) said Sunday.
The GEF – set up by the World Bank and the UN Development Programme and administered by the former to fund sustainable development projects worldwide – expects to become the administrator of the adaptation fund.
GEF officials told IANS that it had agreed to projects being financed through the adaptation fund after approval by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and not by the GEF governing council.
“The formal announcement to make the adaptation fund operational is expected Tuesday,” one official said.
The issue of approval has stalled the setting up of the adaptation fund since 2004, when it was first mooted by developing countries at an earlier conference of parties to the framework convention.
The GEF currently administers the clean development mechanism (CDM) projects meant to help mitigate the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) that are warming the earth’s atmosphere and leading to climate change.
Many developing countries – especially the smaller ones – are unhappy with the GEF administration, complaining that the process of releasing funds is cumbersome. They did not want the adaptation fund to be administered by the same GEF, which will be funded through a 2 percent adaptation levy on CDM projects.
But industrialised countries have wanted the GEF to administer the fund because then they will then have more confidence that the money is being spent rightly.
UNFCCC executive secretary Yvo de Boer said: “The solution is not to lower the bar but to help developing countries improve their capacity to meet tight standards.”
GEF officials deny that their process is cumbersome and in turn complain that some developing countries do not even want to write project proposals themselves.
Now a compromise has been reached in the first week of the Bali summit so that the GEF administers the fund but the approval process is taken away from its board of governors and handed over to the UNFCCC.
India has always said it is indifferent to the idea of GEF administering the adaptation fund as long as approvals are made by the UNFCCC. Now it appears that other developing countries have also accepted this compromise.
But some of the international NGOs gathered here have not accepted the idea yet. Ilana Solomon of ActionAid said: “We insist that this fund be entirely separate from the GEF, as many representatives of the most vulnerable countries have lost faith in the ability of the GEF as an adaptation funding mechanism (administrator).”
There has been no progress so far here on yet another fund sought by developing countries – the technology transfer fund. The proposal may finally be buried, quietly or otherwise, though it is still being discussed.
Industrialised countries have been pushing developing countries to move towards cleaner technologies that emit less GHG. Developing countries have been saying they lack the money to buy these new technologies, especially when they are patented. They want a fund to bridge this gap.
But industrialised countries are pointing out that there is already a special climate change fund, and it is well within its mandate to fund technology transfer. So there is no point in starting yet another fund with its associated bureaucracy, the industrialised countries say.
The special climate change fund received pledges totalling $67 million by June this year. There is also a least developed countries fund that had received $160 million in contributions and investment income by this June.