The Amazon Fund is an innovative and nationally developed climate finance fund, designed to mobilize funding to support the combat of deforestation and sustainable management of forests. It was set up by the Government of Brazil in 2009, and is managed by the Brazilian National Development Bank.
The Amazon Fund’s design aims to ensure sufficient and appropriate accountability to local stakeholders and to funders but also, crucially, to direct funding towards projects and activities that catalyse a transformation towards low carbon development in the Amazon.…
Climate finance, now the focus of much of the international climate negotiations, are those funds designed to address the climate challenge and its implications. Framed by the principle of common and differentiated responsibilities, climate finance has become synonymous with the accountability of richer nations to support the mitigation and adaptation efforts of poorer nations. This crucial principle has informed the work of the UN High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Finance, discussed elsewhere in the paper, and underpins its conclusions and insights.…
Copenhagen was a structured, sovereign-state based negotiation with clear rules of engagement (albeit abused). It had a beginning, middle and (at least in theory) an end. It was designed to reach agreement on a specific set of activities entirely focused on the public good. It was also a veritable ‘walk through babylon’ (as my video clip painfully illustrated), and as we now all know deteriorated into a shambolic, ego-laden, mecantilist dog-fight.…
“We have an Accord that has some of the elements of a legally binding agreement that we need”, opined Achim Steiner from UNEP, “do not under-estimate what we have achieved. And on the trade regime, another year gone and hundreds of millions or billions of dollars investment and income generating on hold and at risk”.
Saturday afternoon, exhaustion showing on peoples’ faces, but an almost full room of folks ponder on the topic of trade and climate.…
Muhtar Kent leads a breakfast discussion about the global challenge of water, leveraging a report launched entitled Charting Our Water Future prepared by McKinsey with numerous other folks. “The global needs of Coca Cola is the equivalent of 8 months use across Mexico City”, we are told alongside Coke’s commitment to become a ‘zero water take’ company.
“We cannot stay as we are, we need to look for another approach…there is a way to deal with the growing gap…today withdrawals are growing at 2% a year, there is a gap of 40% by 2030 between demand (7000 billion cubic meters) and supply…productivity improvements will only deal with 20% of the overall gap, and there is a further 20% of the gap that can be closed by increasing supply in historic ways…that leaves a 60% gap where ‘something different’ needs to be done to address.”
McKinsey has applied the ‘cost curve’ methodology to water and brought crystallized data to the discussion at a high level (see Project Catalyst for how this method has been applied to carbon mitigation).…
Contrary to rumor, money does not make the world go around – but making the maths work does help.
Money, at least on the surface, is the blunting edge of the deal. Estimates vary but there is a convergent focus on total incremental costs rising to about US$100-140 billion per year by 2020. Depending on how one draws the line between here and then, the total bill on this basis that is not going to be paid for by private commercial money might be of the order of US$1 trillion.…
