Katowice COP24

Climate Policy Brief 21, December 2019

The State of Play of Climate Finance – UNFCCC Funds and the $100 Billion Question

By Mariama Williams; editing support and data by Rajesh Eralil

Climate finance is key to achieving the ambitions set out in the Paris Agreement as well as in fulfilling the climate actions that developing countries have proposed to implement in their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the key vehicles for implementing the agreement reached in Paris in 2015. However, there is much concern that the current flow of finance is inadequate to meet the expectations surrounding both the NDCs and the Paris Agreement. This brief presents quick snapshots of the state of play of climate finance of one dimension of the broad, complex and increasingly fragmented universe of climate finance. It focuses on the flow of climate finance that can be monitored and tracked under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the context of the developed countries’ collective goal of mobilizing US $100 billion annually to support developing countries’ climate actions. The issues on both the demand and supply side of climate finance flows are explored, with specific attention to the ebb and flows and achievements of the multilateral public funds.  After highlighting some of the more serious challenges with the flow of climate finance, the brief ends with an overview of the key negotiating issues around future climate finance flows.

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Research Paper 99, September 2019

Ensuring an Operational Equity-based Global Stocktake under the Paris Agreement

By Hesham Al-Zahrani, Chai Qimin, Fu Sha, Yaw Osafo, Adriano Santhiago De Oliveira, Anushree Tripathi, Harald Winkler and Vicente Paolo Yu III

One of the key provisions of the Paris Agreement that was adopted in December 2015 at the 21st session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change is Article 14 on the global stocktake (GST). The GST is intended to be the mechanism by which the Convention Parties that are Parties to the Paris Agreement would be able to periodically take stock of the implementation of the Paris Agreement and to assess collective progress towards achieving the purpose of the Agreement and its long-term goals. This research paper discusses how equity as a principle and a concept played a key role in shaping the modalities for the GST, and looks in detail at the operational modalities for the GST that were agreed upon in Katowice in December 2018 in relation to how equity should be considered and made operational.

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SouthViews No. 175, 8 February 2019

24th Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC: The US COP?

By Mariama Williams

Despite its stated intentions to leave the Paris Agreement, the United States negotiating team continued to dominate many of the negotiations of key areas of the twenty-fourth meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 24) agenda of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The outcome of the meeting, branded the ‘Katowice Climate Package’, again showed developing countries sacrificing many redlines to save multilateralism. The Katowice Outcome reflects very little substantial advancement of the global climate protection agenda. However, the discussion and further refining of the rules will continue in the UNFCCC’s upcoming negotiating sessions in 2019 as well as COP 25. Hence, developing countries have a chance to regroup and push forward to ensure sustainable development objectives are ensured and protected.

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