UN Green Climate Fund worth $100 billion a year

The United Nations (UN)’s Green Climate Fund (GCF) is due to to meet for the first time this week and will propose a fund of $100 billion a year to help the world’s poorest nations combat the effects of climate change.

The GCF is viewed as a stepping stone to a 2015 global climate deal and the postponed meeting will take place on Thursday 23 August. Board members of the fund, after a five-month delay, will take their seats tomorrow and begin the process of finalising details on how the fund will operate, how funds will be allocated and where it will be located.

The 48 member board will have one further meeting before this year’s COP18 meeting in Qatar, which is likely to take place in South Korea.

At the 16th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 16) in Cancun, Mexico, parties established a GCF as an operating entity of the financial mechanism of the Convention under Article 11. The GCF will support projects, programmes, policies and other activities in developing country parties. The GCF Board will govern the fund.

The assets of the GCF will be administered by a trustee only for the purpose of, and in accordance with the relevant decisions of the GCF Board. The World Bank was invited by the COP to serve as the interim trustee of the GCF, subject to a review three years after the operation of the fund. The COP also decided that an independent secretariat would support the operations of the fund.

Similarly, at last year’s COP17 meeting in Durban, negotiators agreed to work towards an international pact to cut emissions in both developed and developing countries to be formalized by 2015 and to start no later than 2020.

But progress was limited at an interim meeting in Bonn, Germany in May, with several developing countries accused by richer states of blocking the negotiations and others demanding more cash pledges before they agree to speed work on issues such as designing new types of carbon markets.

One of the key issues for the first meeting will be to select the fund’s host country. Germany, Mexico, Namibia, Poland, South Korea and Switzerland have all made official requests to host the fund.