FM asks advanced economies to scale up climate change financing commitments

Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman on Friday urged advanced economies to scale up their climate change financing commitments and help emerging countries build climate resilient infrastructure.

She said India has announced a National Infrastructure Pipeline (NIP) consisting of nearly 7,000 projects and the government has adopted the route of reviving the economy through building infrastructure.

Sitharaman said the government is also looking at various routes for funding infrastructure, including by way of infrastructure debt fund or national bank for funding infrastructure, which would be taken up by Parliament soon.

Speaking at the International Conference on Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (ICDRI), the finance minister said natural disasters remind everyone of the risks that infrastructure faces and the vulnerabilities of countries due to climate change.

"I ... appeal to the advanced economies that commitment to financing climate change, transferring technologies, which are important for achieving climate related commitments and goals, will have to be ramped up, speeded up and scaled up.

"Climate finance requirements are at the core of everything that we do in building a resilient infrastructure," Sitharaman said.

She noted that multilateral institutions have played a very critical role in climate change financing and the developed countries have an obligation under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to provide funds to developing nations.

"It is required of developed countries to understand that the commitment made under the UNFCCC will have to be honoured.

"The quantitative commitment of USD 100 billion a year is something that advanced economies will have to recognise and that amount is itself ... is a meagre amount and has to be ramped up," Sitharaman said, adding that even that commitment is not being fulfilled.