Development banks pledge $100bn climate finance

The world’s leading development banks pledged to boost climate finance on Friday, and will commit $100 billion a year to developing countries by 2020.

Finance ministers met in Lima, Peru last week in the build up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference due to take place in Paris in December when a historic global climate agreement is due to be signed.

French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius said: “This is a positive outcome and I think we can say with some certainty that we will reach the $100 billion commitment”.

Rachel Kyte (pictured), World Bank Group Vice President and Special Envoy for Climate Change, said: “It is the beginning of what you need, because if the international community doesn’t roll up it sleeves and get to work this thing is just too big for us.”

The World Bank said it will boost climate financing by a third, making $29 billion a year in additional funding available by 2020.

The Asian, European, African and European multilateral development banks, pledged to double their climate financing according to French finance officials.

The African Development Bank pledged to triple its spending on climate change mitigation and adaptation projects to nearly $5 billion a year by 2020.

Countries including Germany, France, the Netherlands, the United States, Sweden and Britain have recently announced increase climate finance.

A report issued this week by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that spending on climate projects was up from $52 billion in 2013 to $62 billion last year with multilateral development banks making up about 40 per cent.

The finance ministers of twenty nations’ most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change held their first meeting in Lima and called on developed countries to increase spending on climate change adaption projects by 50 per cent.

The Vulnerable Twenty (V-20) group includes Bangladesh, Costa Rica, the Philippines, and Small Island Developing States and represents about 700 million people.

The International Energy Agency has estimated an additional $1.1 trillion will be needed annually from 2050 to keep average global temperature increase below 2°C above pre-industrial times that scientists say would cause catastrophic levels of climate change.