Green Climate Fund: Latin America's Hope for Relief

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Latin America has a new hope for climate change relief.

The so-called Green Climate Fund was proposed at the 2009 Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen and agreed upon during the December 2010 COP meetings in Cancun. It is a planned $100 billion-a-year account to mitigate the impact of climatic change and help communities adapt to related effects. Potential Green Climate Fund recipients range from low-carbon transit projects to community relocation efforts to help communities adapt to rising sea levels.

During April 2011 meetings in Mexico City, the Green Climate Fund's transitional committee established work agendas and elected co-chairs to lead the effort. Significantly, representatives from developing countries make up 25 of the 40-country committee and two (Mexico and South Africa) of the group’s three co-chairs. They have their work cut out: the fund’s regulations and structure must be in place for the UN climate change meetings in November 2011 in South Africa.

The transitional committee is mandated to determine the Green Climate Fund's scope, guiding principles, governance structure and relations with institutions such as the UN and World Bank. The committee must also determine various regulatory issues such as how the fund will disburse payments and how those payments will be monitored and evaluated.

What is certain is that the fund will be governed by a 24-member board with equal representation from developing and developed countries. A trustee will administer the fund and a professional secretariat will support it. The fund is not expected to reach $100 billion per year until 2020.

Many questions remain. It's unclear how fund contributions will be secured and enforced, how payments will be made and how the fund will integrate with other multilateral and bilateral climate change funds. While the COP invited the World Bank to serve as the fund’s interim trustee for the first three years, the trustee’s duties and long-term status have yet to be established. There are also questions about whether the World Bank would have a conflict of interest if it served as trustee. Hopefully, upcoming Green Climate Fund meetings in Switzerland, Tokyo, Egypt and Geneva will result in effective answers to these issues.

AIDA attended the Green Climate Fund meetings in Mexico as an observer. While we took the opportunity to speak to the committee during its proceedings, we were disappointed by the overall lack of participation and access granted to environmental NGOs and other public interest groups. Too many closed-door meetings violated the spirit of transitional committee’s charge to encourage input from "relevant international organizations and observers."

The fund is the closest thing to a binding global decision on climate change and the best chance for the developing world to play a meaningful role in the solution. AIDA will continue to monitor the fund’s rule-making process and push for more active public participation in the proceedings. We all have a stake in the Green Climate Fund.