EU Climate Aid delivered by the EU to Developing Countries.

At the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009,  developed countries agreed as part of the Copenhagen Accord to provide climate aid to developing countries to help them counteract some of the effects of climate change in their regions. The list of countries and amounts pledged is available here.

The EU has just announced as part of a fast-start report to be presented at the Climate Change Conference in Cancun later in November, that it has delivered 2.2 billion Euros to help developing countries cut emissions and adapt to climate change between 2010 and 2012. However the EU is actually falling short of its pledged commitments to finance climate chainge aid. A number of EU countries have not yet delivered  their pledges or are attempting to renounce the commitments pledged at Copenhagen alleging the financial crisis. Italy in particular has renoucned its committment and is no loger included in the updated list of donors.


The report shows that almost half of the EU funding in 2010 went to mitigation to help poor countries cut their emissions by adopting low-carbon technologies and a third went to adaptation projects. A further €362 million was allocated to forest protection. However over half of the finance was delivered in loans and only €1.05bn in grants, according to the report. Climate finance will be a key topic for negotiation at the Cancun conference. The UN  commissioned a report on climate change financing which recognises the scale and the urgency of  supporting and financing mitigation measures in developing countries.

The development of the "Green Fund"

Mexico will host in November of this year an annual UN climate meeting. This is one of the meetings scheduled as a result of the minimalist accord reached in Copenhagen which stated that deep cuts in global emissions will be required to maintain global temperatures below 2 degrees centigrate. The Copenhagen Accord stated that countries would take action in reducing their emmissions, but did not provide any teeth to enforce such cuts. On September 3rd, 50 countries started moving towards the development of a "Green Fund" to finance activities within developing countries to fight the impacts of global warming. Estimates of financing circle around $100 billion a year from 2020 onwards;  however as European countries tackle austerity programmes, the sums pledged are far smaller and there seems to be a move away from speaking about public funding, and instead address the issue through private funding via selling bonds in global capital markets. the International Monetary Fund has been involved in presenting proposals for the development of such a fund.