Ahead of COP26 – Global Climate Funds is Billions of Dollars Short.
Boris Johnson has long dreamed of “Global Britain,” his vision for a free-trading, swashbuckling world power, unleashed by Brexit. And this week, in New York and Washington, he has been doing his best to get the world’s attention.
On Monday, Johnson chaired a closed-door roundtable discussion at the United Nations, alongside U.N. Secretary General António Guterres, where he urged the assembled world leaders to increase their financial commitments and emissions targets.
“Too many major economies — some represented here today, some absent — are lagging too far behind,” Johnson told the group. “You can look away, you can do the minimum, you can hope that if you feed the crocodile enough it will devour you last. Or you can show leadership.”
President Biden gave Johnson a boost, announcing that he wants Congress to double the annual U.S. contribution to vulnerable nations dealing with climate change — to $11.4 billion.
Johnson had struck a downbeat note — quite unusual for him — saying there was a “6 in 10” chance of hitting one of Britain’s key targets for the COP26 climate conference: getting developed nations to agree to a $100 billion-a-year climate fund to help poorer countries cut carbon emissions and mitigate the effects of climate change.
But even after the Biden pledge, the fund is billions of dollars short.
A stinging assessment last week by the United Nations of action plans submitted so far by 191 countries found that global emissions were set to rise by 16 percent by 2030 — putting the planet on track to warm by a “catastrophic” 4.9 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century.
In New York, leaders of small island nations and the least developed countries were not shy about pushing Johnson to get the wealthiest countries to do more.
“For us, it is inexplicable the world isn’t taking action, and it suggests we in small islands are to remain dispensable and remain invisible,” Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley told Johnson, according to a participant in the room.
A recent report by the Climate Action Tracker found Britain to be among a handful of countries where the overall climate commitment was “nearly sufficient” to meet the Paris agreement’s 1.5C temperature limit (the report found that only Gambia was doing what was needed to meet that target.) But it noted that there is a “large gap” between Britain’s targets and levels of action.
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