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The world’s biggest polluters are killing us – they should pay for it

The COP29 climate summit is upon us, and a new global climate finance goal will dominate the agenda. Now more than ever we need to step up our efforts.

Fin McCarron | Senior International Programme Manager

Climate finance is money given to either prevent climate change, or to adapt to the consequences of climate change. Developing countries in particular need this finance because they struggle to raise the capital to transition to low-carbon technologies. They also need more help to deal with the natural disasters that arise because of rising temperatures. 


Most agree that we will need more climate finance than the current target of $100 billion a year. But to pay for this, we will have to find new revenue sources – we cannot keep relying only on the same few countries to stump up. It is high time we expand the list of countries that have to pay climate finance to include the world’s biggest polluters, such as China, the UAE and Saudi Arabia. 


The COP climate conferences have happened every year since they were established at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. They set the framework for how we globally deal with climate change, including who should contribute climate finance to help mitigate and adapt to rising temperatures. 


The list of climate donors was only 23 countries in the end. Most of these countries were either in the European Economic Community, the Anglosphere and Japan. Last year, the OECD estimated that they contributed over $115bn in climate finance


Although an impressive figure, this won’t be enough to mitigate and adapt to climate change. We will need more money and fast if we’re to hit international climate targets and stave off the worst effects of rising temperatures.


The world will decide on an updated climate finance goal at COP29 this year. A range of suggestions from the ambitious to the staggering have been made, based on what is needed to mitigate and adapt to climate change and meet our Paris Agreement goals.


If we keep on as we are, an impossible burden will be placed on the current 23 donor countries. That is why we need to update the countries who pay into this fund, to accurately reflect which nations can afford to do so and which have played a larger part in causing climate change. 


It is fundamentally wrong that petrostates like the UAE, which hosted a very glitzy COP last year, are exempted from coughing up. Why is Greece, with its raging wildfires and struggling economy, obligated to pay money, while Saudi Arabia, which has so much fossil fuel wealth that it is building a city that’s just a line in the desert, is not? 


Perhaps the biggest omission of all is China. It is the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases: its carbon impact is over a million times that of Iceland. Yet Iceland must pay climate finance and China can choose not to. If we’re looking for new sources of climate funding, I can’t think of a better place to start. 


We can’t afford to stop spending on climate finance. Without this, developing countries won’t be able to decarbonise and so we will keep driving climate change, even if every developed country meets all of its climate targets. If the world continues to be ravaged by natural disasters, we will only see more expensive food in our shops as crops are lost. 


If this Labour Government is going to spend more taxpayer money on climate finance, it needs to demonstrate that it is not just leaving money on the table and has exhausted all options for raising it. This includes using our nation’s leverage on the world stage to call for more climate finance donors, as well as liberating more private finance. Without new finance, we cannot possibly hope to keep global warming to manageable levels and avoid the worst impacts of climate change here in the UK and around the world. 

First published by CapX. Fin McCarron is Senior International Programme Manager at CEN.

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