Reuters reports that leaders of a fledgling UN green fund have agreed to select a headquarters this year as part of a plan to oversee billions of dollars in aid to help developing nations fight global warming. The meeting, which lasted over three days in Geneva, saw pitches for hosting the Green Climate Fund, from Namibia, South Korea, Germany, Switzerland, Mexico and Poland. The Fund will oversee and manage around US$100 billion (around R800 billion) in aid from 2020 onwards. “This first meeting was a very productive start,” Ewen McDonald of Australia, a co-chair of the Fund, said in a statement at the end of the talks among the 24 board members working on details of how the fund will operate.
The board hopes to select a host country at the next meeting on October 18 to 20 in South Korea. This decision must be endorsed by environment ministers at the UN climate talks to be held in Doha towards the end of Novmber. In 2009, developed countries agreed to raise aid for climate change, currently at around US$10 billion (around R80 billion,) to US$100 billion from 2020 to assist developing counties to curb greenhouse gas emissions and to allow them to cope with the environmental effects of climate change including natural disasters such as heat waves, rising sea levels, floods and droughts. According to Zaheer Fakir of South Africa, which is a co-chair of the Fund, “The long-term goal of the Fund is to transform the livelihoods of people by responding to the impacts of climate change.”
The money however, still has to be raised and many of the economies of developed nations are struggling. No mention was made and no discussion was held on to raise the money.
The talks focused only on practical details and this avoided raising the issue of the deep mistrust between developed and undeveloped countries regarding the sharing of the burden of climate change and combating global warming. This has been the primary stumbling block at all the UN climate negotiations.