Funding To Stop Climate Change Still Dwarfed By Military Spending
The United Nations climate change negotiations have been rolling in Marrakech for one week with the goal of solidifying the Paris Agreement — an international climate accord to limit global warming — and mapping a way forward for low-carbon and climate-resilient development. High-level leaders are now arriving for the second and final week of negotiations.
A major focus of the climate talks is finance, harnessed primarily through the Green Climate Fund (GCF) — the financial mechanism of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The GCF aims to channel financial support to developing countries for both climate adaptation and mitigation projects at different scales.
Last month a road map to reach $100 billion USD per year by 2020 in climate finance was released by developed countries to effectively support developing countries in sustainable and resilient pathways. This commitment, however, has been critiqued by different stakeholders as inadequate to remedy the challenges of emissions reduction, adaptation, and loss and damage — the negative climate impacts that will occur regardless of global climate efforts.
The largest pledge to the GCF has been from the U.S. at $3 billion, $500 million of which have been disbursed. With the upcoming change in government administration, the remaining $2.5 billion is in jeopardy, posing an even greater financing challenge to an already underfunded financial mechanism.
A recent report from the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), Combat vs. Climate: The Military and Climate Security Budgets Compared, has highlighted that current climate funding pales in comparison to funding for war. Figures from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute have indicated that global military expenditures top the charts at $1.6 trillion USD, towering over the $10 billion USD that has been disbursed to the GCF to date, or the $100 billion USD goal for 2020. These climate funding allocations account to the equivalent of 6.25 per cent of military spending at best and 0.6 per cent percent at worst.
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